Tv ark: Relaunch and beyond

Yes, they do things very well. Again, there's no way of stopping people using them, but there never will be, it's good to have a choice of good quality clips in diffrent formats

This is good quality. You are selling the idea to me!

lol etc.

It might be possible to code a PHP script that takes a filename for its input and then embeds the flash object with the parameter given to it. That would (in theory) mean only a simple modification to the present hub system.

However, I suggest that we wait until all of the clips have been re-encoded and put back before we start worrying about streaming video.

To be fair, if you read Bail's post it is more a rant against the fact that both tvark and thetvroom were full of stuff and worked, then they rebranded and how have all of no content. Rather than a rant about sites in general. The lack of sites these days is also upsetting. Although there are some very fab smaller sites out there (ashfish’s c5 site for example) TV Ark and TV Room are the only two big ones left that also do news and regional stuff.

I do love idents.tv’s system. Notice on this page for example http://idents.tv/blog/?p=487 their flash version (slightly compressed) is a third of the size of the higher quality MP4 one. Now taking into account the screen size of that video that’s not bad at all.

Their system also allows those casual viewers to watch the flash clips of stuff whilst those more serious ident fans can download the high quality stuff. As I’ve said before, it shouldn’t be difficult to hide the HQ stuff behind a free registration form.

Can I be so bold as to enquire just how large a disk and how much bandwidth is required for such a site? Surely prices must have fallen dramatically in recent years. I know I pay about $60 for 250gig of space and 2.5tb of transfer. If TV Ark has a four figure sum it must be rather large and would probably not be helped the less savvy click and play users around these parts.

I'm well aware of what Bail is saying, I just couldn't be bothered to dignify such an obvious inflamatory attitude with a non-hyper-sarcastic-response. Intelligent responses like your own are more welcome. Everyone just tends to associate the rebrands with coinciding with the disappearance of the sites.Do you honestly believe that anyone behind the sites said one day 'Hmm, lets take all the content offline when we rebuild this'? From what I recall, much of that happened well before then, with TV-Ark losing everything on their server, and The TV Room having a lot go missing or break in all those pre-sponsor-day problems. It's fairly obvious efforts are made to bring things back online as quickly as possible. But is there much appreciation or thanks of that? Nope, it's just constant complaint because it's not being done quick enough, or because the BBC East Midlands Town of Bromepentum-Upon-Bull[1] section isn't there. There have been times when everything was lost and rebuilt before, and I certainly don't recall previous times having this approach taken towards the sites, and maybe that's partly what helped bring things back quicker. Shouting at someone because they aren't going fast enough, and saying you hope they go down the pan is not exactly going to inspire someone to work faster, unless we're in some sort of strange communist regime.



Prices have fallen signficantly, but it is still expensive, particularly geared towards pres-site content. Most of the providers who offer heaps of bandwidth just would not intend to ever deliver on it if someone uploaded a lot of video content which will actually use what is promised. Can I be so bold as to ask how close to your 2.5tb of allowance you actually go?

[1]Please members of the forum currently upon Easter holiday from school, don't look it up...

well you'd be accurate in assuming I use practically none of it. Although my assumption would be that the prices could be low enough to allow for two accounts being utilised at about two thirds capacity.

Mind one would *expect* the more decent of these providers to at leastallow you to reach the limits of this limit before doing anything. I know mine (dreamhost) says on their page that they'll charge you something like 10 cents (edit - it's $1) for every gig you go over or something like that.

The ability for at least a few sites to max out must be built. Unless they've based their business model on that of the ISPs where they just have a go at anyone for any reason.

Most are built on that very model. The biggest problem is the whole grey area over the legality of the clips, as only some are approved, with others being there on a sort of unofficial understanding with broadcasters. At the end of the day as webhosting is an unregulated industry, they're free to do as they please and will find any excuse to remove a site if it costs them too much to host, The old 'lol we removed you for violating our copyright policy' is a favourite. There's a reason all hosts bill in advance, and thats so they can take your $40 for the month, then use their TOU to pull the plug the next day. Given its a hard enough job getting a site back online in the first place, I'd not want to be uploading a gigabyte or so of content, just to have it pulled in days, which is a similar problem with adding everything onto Youtube for those who keep suggesting it (you'd have to sign up heaps of accounts to negate the risk of them pulling them all in one go). This does seriously limit the choice of hosting to those either who are big enough not to care, expensive enough to actually be able to deliver on what they offer, or who are small enough and actually interested enough in the content and reasoning of the sites to work with them for a mutual solution.

So this is what could be favoured...

***A possible "always on top" pop-up media player that plays Flash content? In other words, some form of TV Ark media player (interesting)?*** I will look into this further if the general consensus is the aforementioned.

TV Ark is over 7GB in size hence with complete site ripping it caused countless bandwidth warnings!! The server is dedicated i.e. not shared with other people.

chow for now.
j

I've just got a YouTube PM from AidanLunn:

I think there's a couple of issues - one around site overhauls and another about content type.

I think we were all a bit disappointed by TV Ark's Christmas Day relaunch. That's not meant to be a reflection on the huge voluntary effort put in my the webmasters - it's just when something is given a particular significance (the Xmas day date was given several months in advance), it was human nature to expect. I don't know the reasons behind pulling the content on TV Ark, I think there was maybe bandwidth troubles therefore it seemed sensible to pull everything? I'm sure over time more content and sections will return although getting the What's New page working should probably be a priority, I'm sure it was one of the most popular pages as it showed exactly what was new. Throw in an RSS feed and you'd be laughing.

The TV Room was a bit different - some news content has been dropped or moved to The TV Room Plus to make it more manageable and hone in on core branding elements (idents etc.) but the rest of it is there. The old site has remained to get access to old content and it's not just a case of redesigning a page and putting it back, the new pages are all CMS so need to be built up from scratch. And Mike is clearly hard at work - you only need to look at the dates on the homepage to see material is being rewritten, downloads checked and/or re-encoded and put back online. Baring in mind that by having the content stored separately in the database and readily editable in the browser, new pages can be created and edited very quickly and future changes to the design is at the control of a template. Even if the system changed, the content could still be moved quickly with minimum downtime. The site has been an immense resource for over eight years and will hopefully continue to be.

Of course for many of us who've been around pres sites for years, we're spoilt for choice these days. Huge numbers of 'non pres' fans are putting interesting videos on YouTube, members here put material up really quickly and after years of sod-all decent pres sites from Australia, Idents.tv comes along and blows everyone out of the water. YouTube doesn't have bandwidth issues but quality is poor, descriptions are limited and there's always the threat your account will be pulled and it doesn't have the logic that a page on a pres site has. How difficult is it to browse a load of 1997 BBC Two idents compared to all being on one page? It just doesn't compare. TV Ark has always done quantity over quality, it was one reason behind TV Home - a site with a much smaller target but higher quality. Much of the content doesn't need to be superb quality, just good enough to stir some memories or see how things used to be done.

Real Media shouldn't be dumped just because it's a bit old hat. The software is readily available, if not the most favourite program to install, and the results per kb are still decent. By all means look into Flash and H264 but I don't think there's any need to write-off older technology or disregard longtime pres sites just yet.

As to Mr Lunn, I had a run-in with him just the other day over the oldest piece of pres I have in my possession. YouNick

Well, he says he's going to try and find a DivX 'decoder' so he can stuff he captured himself up there...



Does he mean an en coder? And why does it need to be DivX? Is there something about transferring files off tape onto a Windows machine that they have to be in DivX format?

Nicely handled there Asa.