Preparing to say goodbye to AVI, and that is just the tip of the iceberg!

To those that follow the forums closely, you may have caught wind of this already.... EmuMovies is in the process of switching to a new encoding process, in the end that means that our AVI video sets will soon fade away and new MP4 sets (and in turn completely new FLV sets) will be taking their place. The reason why is simple and there is mainly 2 of them.

#1 - File size reduction between 50-70% across the board.

#2 - Increased quality (especially the FLV sets)

In addition as I am finalizing these sets I am ensuring that at a minimum they are 100% compliant with the HyperList naming convention (when applicable). For those of you that are not aware let me take a brief moment to explain what the HyperList naming convention is. For the most part, again when it is applicable, the HyperList naming convention is the same as No-Intro. However, no-intro is in the habit of changing it's naming convention sporadically. These small changes would require the file names on over 50,000 videos to be constantly monitored. The goal of the HyperList team is mainly two fold:

#1 - Have a consistent naming standard for roms and artwork that is static ensuring the greatest compatibility across time and platforms.

#2 - Give us a filtered "minted" list of all English playable games for any given system.

What the team did was first put together a complete list of USA released games. Then add in any other "Mostly European" games that do not have a USA counterpart. This is more difficult than it seems as in many cases the European game will have a completely different name than the USA game. What we are left with is an extremely complete and usable set. Please if you have any questions or coments on moving over to this naming convention let us know.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

I would think at this point most of you would say that's a pretty good update, and I would agree, but I am not stopping there. No Sir!

In addition to all of this, ALL sets are having their audio normalized properly. The first go at this led to some pretty loud videos. Ok, that's not really doing it justice, EXTREMELY LOUD VIDEOS. EmuMovies member NoLogic (our resident scripting and software developer) has been working with me non stop to develop better tools for audio normalization (in addition to editing and encoding optimizations).

THERE COULDN'T BE MORE...OF COURSE THERE IS

Most of my efforts this year have been to really finalize these video sets and get out the best possible product that we could. Over the last five years the quality and content of the sets have been improved upon again and again. That meant that in most cases the newer sets was much more polished than the older sets. The newer sets have a fade in a transition between the game and title and a fade out. There are also much stricter standards on what is included in one of our game videos. Each set is getting the star treatment before being re-released. All videos have been painstakingly re-edited from the masters and in many cases completely redone. The goal being that we have a much more consistent quality product for our members.

EmuMovies usually ends up having a major back end hardware upgrade once or twice a year. The growth rate of this site has been staggering at times and it has caused quite a few headaches for me and some members of the team, but they have been the good kind of headaches (those our the kind of problems that websites want). Last year saw us upgrade servers and bandwidth on three separate occasions, and that is not near as fun as it sounds. Well luckily it seems like we are going to be good for awhile as the last server we moved to would be considered overkill by most. But there is a needed upgrade and right now it's delaying me getting all this content up. The time has come to upgrade to a commercial class internet connection here at EmuMovies HQ so I can handle the bandwidth necessary to get all of this new content up on our servers. (Yes we have more than one ) This is being installed early next week and it should speed things up nicely.

OK, BUT WHATS DONE?

I'll be honest, I started with the easiest stuff and am now getting to the hard stuff. Here is a list of what's complete and ready to go up.

COMPLETE

AAE

ACTION MAX

ADVENTUREVISION

AMSTRAD GX4000

ATARI 5200

ATARI 7800

ATARI JAGUAR

ATARI LYNX

COLECOVISION

DAPHNE

GAMEBOY ADVANCE

MEGA DUCK

NINTENDO VIRTUAL BOY

PC ENGINE

SEGA 32X

SEGA MASTER SYSTEM

SEGA NAOMI

SEGA SG-1000

SEGA SC-3000

SNK NEO GEO POCKET COLOR

SUPER GRAFX

SUPER NINTENDO

TURBO GRAFX CD

VTECH CREATIVISION

BALLY ASTROCADE

BBC MICRO

CASIO LOOPY

DICE

FAMICOM DISC SYSTEM

NEC PC-FX

NINTENDO ARCADE SYSTEMS

NUON

ODYSSEY 2

SNK NEO GEO POCKET MONO

WATARA SUPERVISION

SEGA DREAMCAST VMU

ALMOST COMPLETE

EMERSON ARCADIA

FAIRCHILD CHANNEL F

MATTEL INTELLIVISION

NINTENDO

NINTENDO GAMEBOY

NINTENDO GAMEBOY COLOR

SEGA GAME GEAR

SEGA MODEL 2

SNK NEO GEO

TURBO GRAFX 16

ALSO WORKING ON (The Short List)

MAME

DREAMCAST

That being said, a big thank you goes out to our content contributors. We have quite a few members helping with missing videos and uploading to the WIP area of our FTP. That is helping me tremendously is getting these final sets out to you at a fast pace. If anyone would like to help contribute videos to the project please review our 2011 Video Submission Guide. Any sizable content contributions also result in that member being promoted to content contributor status which equates to full lifetime access to all areas of the site, elevated and bragable status, and access to tools and areas of the site not available to the general public. You want to be cool right?

So that's it in a nutshell, there have been a few minor site updates, including this project blog. I will continue to post frequent updates here and hopefully our other content contributors will follow suit.

Cheers

Important Links:

2011 Video Submission Guide

HyperList Site