Kakutou Shinseki II *Live* indexed and fixed

Quite awhile ago, I decided to try and fix the Live feed of the Kakutou Shinseki II video which was shown over a streaming Windows Media 9 feed. I only caught and recorded the last half of the four hours, and luckily, Ragnafrak got the whole shebang.

The Kakutou Shinseki II video fix is a combination of Rag's video capture, my two portions of the back half, and some video from other sources. This had to be done because as you gamers who have watched the whole 4 hour .asf file of Ragnafrak's, that the last 2 hours were of a "choppy" experience. Now, you will notice minimal video drops. The video's "live" audio were kept throughout, so you will notice audio drops ocasionally.

*Even More History of this video*
Well, making this post even more convoluted, the hardest part of fixing the live feeds were getting the damned thing indexed, or making it seekable. Originally, the files were of the .asf type like you get from am.sega.jp. which when downloaded via STREAMBOX, are unseekable. This was not fixable via conventional means. I used this program I came across after many failed sessions (ASFTools) trying to get this thing seekable via other means...like dv camcoding this via S-Video out on the video card out, which yeiled a washed out video. ASFTools is a program you have to check out for any .asf/wmv video fixing or reencoding.

Unfortunately, indexing the video was only half of it, as it didn't yield Audio that was synced with the video. The "live" nature of the files were the trouble as the original videos yielded 60 fps, which was not constant due to dropping of the feed. The Audio had to be recorded by playing the files and using a program to record the output. The result was pretty good.

Now the toughest thing was stitching all the videos together. The first problem was getting the files stitched together. The video yielded by ASFTools was not "stichable" via ASF/WMV program tools that let you do such things. Again, I think the "live" feed could have been the problem. So I used Stoik Video to reencode the video portion using a Windows media codec. The reencoding was first done keeping the 60 fps, but the file was way too big, and reecoding to 30 fps would help.

Other cleaner video from am.sega.jp and Gpara, and other sources were used to fix the drops in video thoughout the original videos.

Anyway, the syncing of audio and video took up the most time. I swear I was gonna kill the computer. After syncing, VirtualDub was used to stitch the various parts together.

Anyway, to conclude this Illiad/Odssey adventure, the video comes to be 1.3-1.4 GB big. You can use VirtualDub to cut these in half to fit on CD for backup. Use www.dvdrhelp.com for primers on how to chop avi files, as it's really simple. Otherwise, I can post a primer here.

Anyway, shout outs to Ragnafrak for sharing his capture, and Myke and Jeff at VFDC for this wonderful forum and hosting.

If you're a newbie to VF (VFEvo's coming soon), I consider this video to be the best introduction into the VF lifestyle cause you get to see lot's of behind the scenes events.... not just two, electronically generated fighters duking it out, but also the person behind the joysticks.

Oh, there's no link... beg Myke to get the link out soon.

 

Myke, link please...pretty please with sugar on top. /versus/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

Dude, you rule. That sounds like a lot of trouble to go to.

I'm sure everyone will appreciate you for it when we get to see the finished result.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Catch22 said:

Oh, there's no link... beg Myke to get the link out soon.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please Myke give us the link, or at least an idea of when it will be up.....please /versus/images/graemlins/confused.gif.....

Is this really going to be a 1.4 gb file? Or several small files?

Anyways, thanks!

- - - - -
" The "live" nature of the files were the trouble as the original videos yielded 60 fps, which was not constant due to dropping of the feed. ."

Yeah, I have the recording off of IRC of the last two and then some hours of the tournament (broken into two videos, the second one being longer than the first). And I can remember some points in which the feed just dies out, sometimes completely:

-Chibita vs HSU, the audio cuts out and the videos skips slightly on and off, not that badly though.

-Tsuchimo vs YoroKage, the end of the second round is no sound with a frozen image, it resumes a few seconds after.

-The most troubling part had to be the finals of Minami vs Heruru, during the first match there are only a few moments of bad feed, but the second match, if I remember correctly there are like 2 or 2 and a half rounds that are basically audio and video fading in and out....

-I think that everything else, like the special exhibitions and matches before the quarter finals were fine from the various recordings that I have seen.

- - -

To those who assembled it:

-What was the most problematic portion of the event in terms of having low quality live feed?

-How long did this take, I mean KSII happened a while back, have you been working on this that long?

- - - -

And lastly, thanks again, I think we all appreciate this work, I know I do /versus/images/graemlins/cool.gif!

 

I worked on this thing alone for probably over 50 hours, and that's a conservative estimate. This video was complete a while back, but I was unable to reencode the audio from WAV using compression codecs because of audio/video synchronization problems that occured by the end of the video (the sound occurs a second after when it should). I was getting sick and tired of trying it with alot of audio compressors, but one day, I tried ALaw and it kept synchronization. Keep in mind it takes over 30 minutes just to reencode the video's audio while keeping the video as is (done with virtualdub). Let's just say there was a whole ton of experimentation on my part, and was done though very unconventional means.

The whole file takes a little over 4 hours.

BTW, the audio was reencoded, but are directly from the live feed, but whenver there was bad drops like the Minami/Heruru matches, the video was replaced by "other" video sources.

The size of the audio is a big portion of the file, as encoding from the WAV source to ALaw still only got it down from 3+ GB, to the 1.3GB size that the file is.

I tried reencoding the audio from WAV to MP3, which gets the overall fiie size to under 850MB, but by the end of the movie (remember, 4+ hours,) the sound becomes UNSYNCHRONIZED by about a second. If someone can reencode it to MP3 and keep synchronization... I think the problem lies within the publically available MP3 codec (I forgot it's name.)

 

03:43:56

Watch movie at that exact time, (it is right after Heruru gets an excellent on Minami Akira in their second match), is that Zero-Chan on the video, or not?

I am just saying this because I know that Zero-Chan went to KSII, and sat near the front right, so is this her?

- - - - -
Sorry if you didn't want this pointed out.......that is if it is you...

 

I want this 1.4gb of goodness, but what the hell is barrybot and how do I get to it?

 

[ QUOTE ]
FaisonI said:

I want this 1.4gb of goodness, but what the hell is barrybot and how do I get to it?

[/ QUOTE ]

http://virtuafighter.com/irc/ Start reading.........once you get in mIRC, you can ask anyone questions there, and they will be more than happy to help, well most will........

Oh warning, this file takes many hours to obtain, so make sure you can leave your computer idle for a good while, as 1.4gb is certainly not small /versus/images/graemlins/grin.gif.

 

Catch, you're my hero.

Re: audio synch issues - this happens a lot in virtualdub if the video and audio are simultaneously encoded. It's no import, but wmv might be the same way because I believe it handles sound separately after processing video. I'm not sure where I read that.

In virtualdub, the fix when something gradually desynchs over a long period of time is pretty simple. Choose an arbitrary quiet point (before a match loads EG) and shift the audio over a half second. Do that a few times over the course of several matches and you can pretty much have seamless synching.

 

Sound fixed.

Catch, I fixed the sound by MP3ing it, and the filesize reduction is enormous - 580 megs. I was surprised, it was easy...I just tossed the file into virtualdub, put video on direct stream copy, but audio on full processing mode, and chose an appropriate MP3 compressor for it (3Kb/s). The end result is synched and runs smoothly.

I'm going to try to upload this to barrybot on the #barrybot irc channel, and I don't think there's any reason it shouldn't replace the larger file.

PS: spectacular work putting all this together nearly hitch-free. You managed to get stoik to read a wmv9 live file and spit out something usable? I never could, it always choked for me. We'll have to compare notes.

edit: I am now serving this copy on #vfhome using the trigger !kaku ... it will just send the file immediately, no browsing or hassling with commands. Too bad it's a max speed of 15 KB/s.
As soon as I can upload it to barrybot's fast server I will.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

There was alot of "jumping through hoops." The video was first gotten from ASFTools, but the audio was not fixed with video, so when there were drops in frames, but the video it did spit out was indexed... so what I did was...

EXPERIMENT. I tried just recording sound straight from playing the file, and recording with AUDACITY, a free sound recording program. I was pure luck that the sources synced. This was after a whole bunch of other experiments.

But later, I encountered more syncing problems when I tried to chop the video and put in cleaner mathes. You'll notice a whole bunch of matches were replaced.

It was a long (I swear it was more like 80 hours put in, )process, but it was worth it.

I was using Virtual Dub with the Lame MP3 codec, just as you described, but no luck... it could have been that, or it could be that ALaw->MP3 fixed the problem... the WAV formatted file that I have is 3+GB. ALaw is just 1/4 compression of WAV, so yeah, it still yields huge files, and yes, it's mostly on the audio portion. Well, all I know is that I'm not modifying that file again.

BTW, again, big props to Ragnafrak for sharing his file.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

np

big props to barrybot's connection and cable modems.. so that downloading this whole thing too me 2 hrs /versus/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

 

Re: Sound fixed.

Some stuff:

LameMP3: some sites claim it's the best mp3 codec, and that it yields higher quality, and blah de blah blah. Simple tests with several files and compression levels shows me that the real fraunhofer mp3 codec is the best. Apparently it's not something you come across easily, it costs a decent chunk of money and most people do not have it (what with blade, ogg, and lame mp3 out there). Anyway, your problems may or may not be related to lame mp3 encoding, but the real mp3 codec turned out better results both in terms of filesize and synching. If you have it, use it.

Something else weird I discovered: your video is wmv9 video interleaved with whatever audio, I never knew you could make an avi that's half wmv and half "other". It's just a wmv with different sound and the avi container.
This has caused some people to have trouble playing it (I guess those who refused to install wmp9). It can be re-encoded into divx or anything else, and I'm trying to divx it just for fun to see the results. Undoubtedly a larger file and lower quality, I remember thinking "Goddamn his avi size is really good once you compress the audio... as good or better than the original wmv filesize". The fact that it's wmv9 video explains why.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

yep, don't have the real MP3 codec by that German... only the free Lame, hence, I couldn't test it that way. It was my suspision that Lame could have been the problem, since many have exclaimed it's crappiness.

Yep, you noticed the WMV9 video encoding. Found out you can interleave almost any type of mpg-4 with any almost any audio type and call it an "avi" (audio/video interleave) when I did the reencoding of video. Used Stoik to encode video, then Virtual Dub for the majority of the editing and audio combining.

I tried Divx, got good results, but when I tried WMV9 compression, the file size to qualtiy was the best. No doubt if I had Divx PRO, the file size would have been better.

I definitely learned a bunch of stuff about encoding of video for internet distributions' sake.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

anybody have any idea when barrybot gonna work again.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

[ QUOTE ]
archangel said:

anybody have any idea when barrybot gonna work again.

[/ QUOTE ]

What problems are you (and others) having with it?

Are you remembering that Bbot has gone from #vfhome and #barrybot several times?

Once you get in Creed also has the smaller file at #vfhome under the trigger command !kaku......is that still there or is it on Bbot now?

 

Re: Sound fixed.

#barrybot is working fine. Remember that he now on (almost exclusively) the channel barrybot. That means he's not on vfhome for those who aren't catching on. He's on the irc channel #barrybot. Type /join #barrybot to visit him.
He will be glad to see you.

My trigger isn't working at the moment because I'm using my precious and weak upload bandwidth to upload the wmv9/mp3 kakutou AVI to barrybot. You can then download it at 10x the usual speed.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

every time i try to get it from barrybot it sends it then it says accepting file then it csays connection failed.

 

Re: Sound fixed.

I had the exact same problem, but I just kept retrying to download it and after about the 20th or 30th attempt if finally connected and I was able to download the file.