Hydra video and 2 bay area vf clips (part 1 of 3)

Here are 3 movies available for direct download:

<a target="_blank" href=http://www.feixaq.com/bavf/media/mucho_hydra.zip>Mucho Hydra (37MB)</a> - featuring Iron Monkey Fist and Blonde One from Florida

<a target="_blank" href=http://www.feixaq.com/bavf/media/bavf0427-m3_feixaq.zip>m_3 vs FeixaQ (8MB)</a> - bay area vf: april 27 playoff match

<a target="_blank" href=http://www.feixaq.com/bavf/media/bavf0427-akapan_segaduck.zip>Akapan vs Segaduck (8MB)</a> - bay area vf: april 27 playoff match

Note:
These three movies will be available for HTTP download from my webhost till Tuesday evening, at which point in time they will be rotated out in favor of 3 more bay area vf clips. On Thursday evening, the second set of 3 clips will be replaced by the final 2 bay area vf clips featuring the semifinal and final matches of last weekend's gathering. Finally, on Saturday, all clips will be available via FTP download from VF4fx.

 

Kewl, what are the characters in the matches ?

 

Mucho Hydra - Akira vs Jacky
m_3 vs FeixaQ - Lei Fei vs Kage
Akapan vs Segaduck - Wolf vs Jacky

 

Hydra video have their settings as 400 life? The game looks so slow to me cos of the life........

 

This was our first video from florida. What that was, a hydra match, 10 rounds max life. Its just a little thing we do down here once in a while, thats not how we normally play

 

To Blonde One and IMF:

Glad to see you guys give an entertaining match. Interpret it how you will (it's not really negative or positive--though I enjoyed the clip), but this is what ran through my mind watching the Hydra Clip:
-You two know each other's play style very well
-Cool stepping
-"SO THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAY VF4 LIKE TEKKEN TAG!!!" Seriously, I almost thought I was watching a mishima match in Tekken Tag for awhile there. Not saying that was good nor bad, but it was entertaining and interesting.
-Keep up the work guys!

Your Pal,
Chanchai

 

blonde_one had a great match with the akira player, well done..

 

I guess after years of Tekken it shows huh. Well, thank you guys for the responses, we're looking forward to bringing you more vids in the future (hopefully smaller.....sorry). Anyway thank you feixaq for putting our vid up. We're getting new matches as I post. So I'll probably see some of you at the NYC frolic. later =)

 

Well, after watching the clip, the thing I was most impressed with was actually IMF impressive recoveries from staggers. It's something that Shota, Rodney and Troy keep dinging me on, that I'm lazy about strguggling out of staggers. I was sure that IMF was gonna eat something nasty from Jacky when his throw was escaped and he was sent into the wall. Very impressive recovery there.

 

Hopefully, well be getting vids from the other guys on team hydra soon.

 

On the subject of staggers....

One thing about VF4... It's extremely easy for me to struggle out of just about any stagger that can be struggled out of. In VF2, this was also the case for me. However, when I play VF3, I still miss the struggle opportunities a lot (aside from getting off the ground that is).

In VF2 (and VF4) staggers are just so "pronounced" and spelled out to me. In VF4, that red flash will just about do it, but as a habit, I tend to struggle after anything that looks like it can be struggled out of.

-Chanchai

 

Re: On the subject of staggers....

bah...hit sparks...we don't play with em out here, normally. But yeah, I know what you mean about older VFs, though I was the opposite (when I was just frustrated all to hell). I could struggle fairly well in VF3 towards the tail end of my playing, but I never was very good at struggling soon enough in VF2.

 

we're looking forward to bringing you more vids in the future (hopefully smaller.....sorry).

I didn't mention it before because there wasn't really an excuse to, but since you've given me one... I re-encoded the .wmv down to 25 megs. There's almost no quality loss so if anyone wasn't getting it because of the size, maybe now you can.

 

Hey Matt, how do you decode a WMV file? TMPGenc? I was looking to compress the Hydra vid but wasn't sure how to get from WMV --> AVI...

 

Getting from wmv/asf to other formats is hard, because microsoft won't make it easy (or even legal). There are a few programs that are supposed to be able to do this. TMPGenc can turn asf to mov, and asf and wmv are the same. So you have to rename your .wmv to asf, then open it in tmpgenc and convert. The problem is that 9 times out of ten tmpegenc will hang/crash in the encoding process, sometimes halfway through but usually within the first 100 frames. The chunk it creates before crashing is watchable, but so what...

The second method, which I'd love to see you try, is to use "asftools" .. it's at
<a target="_blank" href=http://www.geocities.com/myasftools/>www.geocities.com/myasftools/</a>
When I use it, it seems to work, but the avi file chokes (lacks a decompressor... WMV1) and cannot be opened by other programs. So either the AVI is crap, or I'm missing a codec, which is unlikely since I have 18240983049832140 of them. I'm curious to see if you get the same results.

The third trick is to find a working copy of Virtualdub 1.3d or earlier, which supported conversion from asf/wmv until microsoft made a polite phone call to the program's author. I have this, but it can't do anything with the wmv's because it claims I lack the wmv1 decompressor again.

Easiest thing to do is give up and just tool around with the wmv if you want to try squeezing a nicer filesize out of it. Most platforms out there can handle wmv's fine, including macs.

 

PS

PS: I successfully converted an older asf, but nothing recent and nothing with .wmv format. If anyone has information on the wmv1 decompressor (is it something that gets overwritten/destroyed when you install more recent wmv codecs/players?) then please take a second to share.

 

Hey Creed and Feixaq, is there anything I can do with the file besides try making it smaller, To make it easier on you guys? We're still learning a bit over here. We have Adobe 6.0.

 

Adobe Premiere 6.0 is really a video editing software with some compression tools built in, but what I would suggest is this:

1. Use Premiere to capture the video transmission and to edit the video as you see fit
2. Save as uncompressed AVI (uncompressed video, uncompressed wave audio). This will be a HUGE file, but...
3. Use wm8eutil (available from Microsoft.com) and use the following command line to compress:

wm8eutil -input capture.avi -output capture.wmv -v_mode 0 -v_bitrate 500000

The key here is not to rely on Premiere to compress the video for you, but the wmv8 encoder. Be sure to specify a swap file on you system like 2GB so that wmv8enc won't crash your system midway through compressing.

Step 2 will create a 800MB file for a 3 minute clip; Step 3 will compress this to 12MB with good quality.

Alternatively, if you like DivX 5.0, you can compress the video at 512kbps and the audio as MP3, 44khz, 16-bit stereo, 128kbps and it should give you roughly the same size and quality. You might be able to run the DivX and MP3 codecs via Premiere, but if not, VirtualDub (www.virtualdub.org) is a freeware program that can help you with this.

 

Read about myasftools, haven't tried it yet. Maybe I'll try it when I whip up the next batch of movies and see if I can decode .wmv. Thanks for the info!

 

I just checked the frequently asked questions on myasftools's page. Doh. Wish I'd done it a while ago. The gist of it was:
Q: "hey I get a wmv1 or wmv2 error trying to convert"
A: "that's cuz the wmv format has no decompressor, at least nothing legally released by microsoft. AFAIK no codec in the world exists that can solve this issue.

He goes on to say you can re-encode the movie and cites tmpgenc, but again that's flaky.