Finally a RiffTrax player!! - v.1.1.1

[FBX]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

[Variety of Cells]

Chill out.  He's doing you a favor to begin with. 

[SaucyRossy]

WHAT THE HECK DO I INSTALL! Someone give me an exact link to the DOWNLOAD not the main page god is it so hard?

Chill out emo boy....

[Tooplex]

Thats the same link and if i click continue i get windows genuine advantage which i do not want to download i want this stupid direct x thing now tell me how to get it please!

[WouTar]

Chill man...

[MoralThreat]

I would think FBX would know where to get Directx since he created this program.  If you don't like that do a google search and stop complaining.

And FBX this is a great program.  I haven't had any synching probs since I started using it.

[FBX]

Thats the same link and if i click continue i get windows genuine advantage which i do not want to download i want this stupid direct x thing now tell me how to get it please!

Windows Genuine Advantage is a required pre-requisite to downloading anything from Microsoft now. Unless your running a pirated version of Windows you should'nt have an issue. Just download and install that, then install direct x.

And FBX this is a great program.  I haven't had any synching probs since I started using it.

Thats good to hear I'm going to try it out on Crossroads and see how well it manages desyncing.

[Tooplex]

Uhhh yeh i installed that on my last computer and it said it was fake and i got annoyed for a month and a half and i bought it from PC World so im not touching that stupid thing again isnt there a way around it? there must be!

[FBX]

so I tried this out on crossroads and it worked great (partially because the mp3 itself was perfectly synced with the movie)! Nevertheless it needs some improvements so look forward to another version sometime in the future.

The "(buggy) stutter detection": When you leave a movie paused for over a minute, the DVD player will stop spinning the disk to conserve power (or heat or something). Upon playing the movie (and mp3 at the same time) the DVD will instantly start playing whatever was in the buffer until the buffer runs out and then pause until the DVD until the player finds the correct location. I took advantage of this moment to test my stutter detection. After pausing the movie to let my dogs out, I came back, enabled stutter correction and set the threshold to 50%. The movie paused for as predected, and finally resumed. Simple to say, the stutter correction worked perfectly, the mp3 was in perfect sync with the movie! (In case you cant tell, this made me giddy) I immediately turned stutter correction off afterwards because it still is buggy during normal playback. I might make it an option to have this automatically turn on after the movie has been paused for a while, and then turn back off after 5 seconds. I'll also change the default threshhold to 50%.

Minor sync changes: I had some issues with this. Mainly I dont think changing the mp3 by anything less than a second does anything. I suspect this is due to a limitation with the direct X API I'm working with, so I'm going to see if I can find a way around this.

Loading chapters later in the movie: As suspected, these weren't perfectly synced. In the particular moment I had to use this feature, the rifftrax came in perfectly, but I wasn't aware at how desynced the two were because the line that it was syncing to had already been said. I had to manually rewind 10 seconds and then try it, then try again. Perhaps I will add an option to start 5 seconds BEHIND disembaudio lines (when you select them) so that its easier to sync them. I think I will also add an option to only move the mp3 to the desired line so that you can rewind the movie, then double click the line when it comes up.

"use offset": Even though I didnt save an offset, the program should still keep track of the current offset, and use that when you change chapters. I dont think this happened for me so I'm going to check this.

Other planned features: highlight disembaudio lines and chapters as you pass them, a timer for the mp3 position, anything anyone can suggest really (thats possible)

[Variety of Cells]

That's going to be tough, considering I was under the impression that half the stuff you've done was incredibly hard, if not impossible.  All I can say is keep on keepin' on, and thank you. 

[ColinBlair]

Any chance of a source code release? I would love to make some changes of my own to what you have already done. Saving the offset and library settings into an SQL Express database, try out a WPF front end option, etc.

One question/suggestion, WMP has a built in speed changer in the enhancements section, any way to plug into that to change the playback speed of the individual file?

[FBX]

unfortunately there isn't a lot to add to it anymore due to the limitations of the API. A lot of the cool stuff you can do in windows media player isn't open to programs like this, otherwise I would of made guitar hero for PC while I was at it. Also the code sucks, I really didn't comment any of it, so its hard to read. I've been sleeping on this a little because after toying with it I found one very very bad issue I'm not sure how to approach:

On crossroads I used the readme feature to zip to the disembaudio line "I dont believe you". Then I rewound both the audio and video 10 seconds. When it came back to the line, the two were no longer in sync. After checking it, I can clearly see that both are rewound 10 seconds, and yet it manages to desync by almost a second. How? I believe the problem is that DVD playres actually simulate the time elapsed / remaining, so its not actually accurate. When I rewound the DVD, it would rewind 10 seconds, but then lurch about 2 seconds forward. This basically ruins my rewind and forward feature.

Secondly, the offset might work at pre-set portions, but it doesnt seem to translate to later (or earlier) portions of the movie very well. Crossroads is probably the best synced of all the rifftrax I've used. You just set it and forget it. However, with offset saving, the movie actually desyncs when you zip to certain points other than what you saved it at. What I mean is the offset changes even though the movie stays in sync with the mp3. This is probably because of the same issue.

Ok now on to the topic of natural desyncing- if a rifftrack desyncs to the DVD and the DVD itself never stutters or goes through a layer transition pause, then I believe the cause is the rifftrack is actually to blame.

I suspect that while editing the rifftrax, the makers (mike or some hired goon) are rewinding the DVD and using that to sync it, but are getting problems with it because they trust the reported time on it, which is probably incorrect half the time. I can imagine it would VERY time consuming to sync a rifftrax perfectly by this method. Likewise testing a rifftrax to see if its synced is also very time consuming.

A solution (if this is the problem) might be using DVD ripping software that can convert the movie into a format with stable time code in it. Then when making the rifftrax, you use the ripped version instead. Then there is no DVD wind-up wind-down or seek problems and time portions should always be consistant. This is all theory though, I'm not 100% whats going on, and changing the format when making the rifftrax might not fix the problem because everyone's DVD player is a little different anyways.

Ok so on to source code release: I'll get back to you on that, right now its sorta in an inbetween version state that I dont think will port very well. Also, if you dont have visual studio 2005 this probably wont be much use. I doubt it'll convert back to 2003.

[Mr. Dark]

Add another notch for 'can't get link to work'.  Says it can't find ez-files or whatever.  I may poke around and try to make it work later, too damn tired now, and I need to level up my warlock in World of Warcraft.  (Just added that to ensure I out-nerd any subsequent commenters.)

[MrTorso]

A solution (if this is the problem) might be using DVD ripping software that can convert the movie into a format with stable time code in it. Then when making the rifftrax, you use the ripped version instead. Then there is no DVD wind-up wind-down or seek problems and time portions should always be consistant. This is all theory though, I'm not 100% whats going on, and changing the format when making the rifftrax might not fix the problem because everyone's DVD player is a little different anyways.

In another post I believe Conor talked about how their audio was locked to the video when recording the Rifftrax which would mean they aren't just watching the DVD on a stand alone player.

[FBX]

ez-files seems to be an easily overloaded server. Just try again later.