reggie said:
Rant incoming.
What the hell are they doing? They seem to be making dumb decisions left and right now. Have they even acknowledged the compression issues? You'd think it would be a quick easy fix and yet here we still are with the same fucking problem. When you have amatuers on YouTube doing a better job versus people being paid at GiantBomb, the problem becomes a joke. Now they're posting freely availabe HD trailers on YouTube in 360p with terrible compression issues - is this real life? I get the feeling that they've become complacent, you only need to see their sarcastic smart arse replies to people who even so much as offer a simple legitimate criticism for proof.
They re-encode everything, even videos. It's stupid, but it's the way their video stuff is set up.
From listening to Vinny talk about it, issues they had, solutions they found out and other stuff over the years, it seems to me that their video editing line is pretty much like this:
Record a Video (or, like in the trailer situation, get a video provided by a publisher) -> edit a video in high definition (if it's content they make, if it's trailers this step does not apply) -> upload said high definition video to a cloud encoding solution (huge upload, as I imagine those masters are not that compressed) -> download the 3 differently encoded videos (low, high, hd)-> upload to amazon hosting services -> upload one of these videos do youtube
Im not 100% sure they have to download from whatever cloud encoding solution and then upload to amazon or if that step is automatized (from the encoding solution directly to amazon).
But that's why most video issues on GiantBomb can't really be addressed by them: It's out of their hands. Other than bitrate tweaking, and even that must be limited, there's not much they can do. B-Frames, V-Frames, quantizers, misc specifications are probably all locked down (because, if I had to guess, all outsourced video encoding is done by hardware encoders).
If you ask me, it's a shitty solution. The amount of time you spend sending data back and forth is horrendous. I believe they have a 40mbit up and down connection, but still. However, I don't know if they can, in budget, be spitting out 3 versions of a video in a timely manner for the amount of video content they put up. And if the encoding machines breaks down, the site is left with no video content for how long that machine takes to be fixed. The Tricaster they had set up for live content is still down, and it's putting a massive stress on Vinny and Drew, which clearly reflects on the quality of the live content (and also recorded content) they make. Imagine if they couldn't put videos up at all.
It takes me 3 hours to downsample and deinterlace a 1080i video to a 480p format. If I wanted to downsample that 1080i to 720, 480 and 360, it would take me nine hours. For one 49 minute video content. How many of these videos does GiantBomb put up a day? I don't upload them anywhere either. So you can add the upload times to these videos. With that in mind, the Time it takes to publish adds up really fast.
Uploading videos to youtube added another layer of complexity to their system. Since it's for free members only, I can understand why they won't bother to upload anything other than 360p videos. SPECIALLY trailers which are already available in HD on youtube itself.
Why would they waste time and resources re-uploading the GTAV trailer to youtupe in 720p (or 480p), when a 1080p version already exists, probably even an official one?
Linking to that from the homepage also serves no purpose, as it would take time to research where's the "official" version of the trailer was, sometimes the official version of the trailer is not even on youtube, and sometimes the video gets taken down (if it's not the official version). Who wants to do that?
One could argue that uploading a 360p version is also a waste of time - I agree. But I believe official videos on a website like GiantBomb are a waste of time in the first place. But they have to put these videos up, otherwise the publishers will get mad at them.