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January 27, 2006
r.i.p. d.v.d. ii
this time i'm stopping everything, so the data dvd service as well as the old video dvds will no longer be available.
this comes after the rousing success of our new host, which should ensure download speeds near or at the maximum of a given connection for new and popular runs. the greater use of bittorrent will also help people on poor connections get things more reliably.
i simply cannot justify making the data dvd service available any longer after all the time and money it has cost me, and especially how it has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help to the site. maybe someday, when we find someone as dedicated as we (radix and i) are to help with the site, data dvd duties could be assigned to them, but for now, i'm through with it.
and as the site grows more popular, the video dvds, which i was able to use as a source of income for the site only thanks to the obliviousness or the kindness of the game companies, make less and less sense. i can no longer ignore their capability to harm the site if some company hostile toward their existence finally gets wind of them, and orders have once again slowed to a trickle on top of that.
i apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. if you had your heart set on a specific video dvd, you may contact me via email, and i'll see what i can do.
Posted by njahnke at 1:32 PM | Comments (2)
January 21, 2006
don't let the door hit your huge butt on the way out, vhs
so everyone is buying dvd recorders, and this is a good thing, but i'm sorry to report that they aren't buying them fast enough.
insipidmuckywater's brilliantly executed runs of genesis games i fondly remember almost met a cruel fate among the hundreds of interlocking parts that make up the guts of his vcr: witness the horror (DivX, 5.0 MB)!
this was after setting up everything so it was like the last time i encountered something like this. my guess is that neither of the tbcs could do much about it, because the image was rolling with a lower frequency than 60 hz - probably something more like 10 or 20 hz, and probably not constant.
luckily, an amazing virtualdub filter was all that was required to restore the video to an acceptable level of watchability (DivX, 6.2 MB). i used rather heavy-duty settings with the filter, turning everything up to the most cpu-intensive levels, meaning that these runs took an order of magnitude longer to process than they should have. however, given how short they are, i barely felt it.
anyone care to place a bet on whether vhs will nearly destroy someone else's runs before it dies a death that's more than fifteen years overdue?
Posted by njahnke at 8:53 PM | Comments (2)
January 4, 2006
just a quick note
to show this pic of v5 in its environment:
just brought the raid online, so that's ~480 gig of space at 2x normal speed. still no word on pal capture; been having enough hell as it is trying to keep capture working with all the crap hp installs on their machines. i'll probably wipe it tomorrow and install the 64-bit windoze xp, and i'll be done with those problems ... and probably create entirely new ones for myself.
Posted by njahnke at 7:47 PM | Comments (2)