Hasta La Motion!

This is something I’ve spent a fair amount of time on already. Last year I wrote about some of my findings but the truth is that it didn’t anywhere.

The main problem is that, for whatever reason, Lagarith is not finding its way into ffmpeg and rumours say Youtube uses ffmpeg for doing the transcoding. So if you tried to upload that 2gbytes video file to Youtube you’d end up getting a “unknown format” error.

Early this month I checked what was the status with all this, and seemed that nothing had changed so I thought about looking for other lossless codecs. This time I tried with Huffyuv. Video file size is bigger but at least ffmpeg supports it.

The idea is to let Youtube host the uncompressed files for me (5gb-20gb each). I don’t know if that’s what happens or not, but I would think such service must keep the original.

This is how the process looks like:

1. kkapture the demo using Huffyuv for encoding.
Note: I have antialias enabled on my nvidia config as that compresses better than non-antialias stuff.
2. Now you’ll get a bunch of .avi files that you need to merge. To do so just use Virtualdub. While you’re on it, go ahead and remove the aspect ratio black bars.
3. Upload the file to youtube. This may take a while. It takes about 24 hours per video here.

And that’s it. Now it’s up to Youtube to keep updating their videos as technology evolves. It’s a slow process, but if the theory is right it just needs to be done once.

You can see the ones I’ve managed to do already in the (just re-opened) demoscene section.