MSPro VideoServer plugin public beta....

[Dr Mordrid]

Ok guys....time to see how it works on various systems. This is just the announcement....the actual download should be up Monday;

http://www.videotools.net

Yeah, yeah...I know...he wants people that have registered to beta it

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

This is a crazy affair. I have no objection to paying for a definitive software that I find useful, but pay to offer him a testing service on top, for a first beta??? First time I've heard of this, and I've done a lot of beta testing (and alpha) in my life.

[Dr Mordrid]

It's basically done Brian and works very well indeed; he's just concerned about "the FilmRender syndrome".

Remember FilmRender? Its creator put a s**load of work into it only to have it pirated, at which time it was taken off the market and not supported.

The VideoServer "beta" is more a confirmation that it'll work on a large number of systems (no reason it shouldn't), but if someone cracks it during the beta he's put a lot of work in with no benefit.

Basically he's trying to get his return on investment up front. I completely sympathize with him. I also trust him because he's supported his products so well in the past.

Also; you don't just get VideoServer for $25 USD; you also get a bunch of AVISynth extensions and Link2, a very useful program for frameserving (especially useful with segmented files) off the HDD to a host program.

The AVISynth extensions are useful, but Link2 is much easier to use for straight frameserving. It also solves the problem AVISynth has with programs that don't use Windows conventions to load *.avi's. This causes it AVISynth to fail when used with a lot of new programs.

Edwin took over maintaining the AVISynth code base when Ben Rudiak-Gould disappeared from the online scene back in 2000.

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

THis has got to be the most criptic way of getting beta software I have ever seen. I payed my $25 and got a registration key back but how to I download the software?? Is it the Link2 download? When I click on the "Download the beta plugin" it asked for a login and password..

[Sciascia]

Sounds good, question I have is what kind of rendering times are we looking at compared to just saving the entire clip and encoding it in the standalone directly. Just curious to see what kind of performance hit there is. Still a very good option that I will be trying out here shortly.

[cods]

Would love to try it but....

I am sorry if I seem cheap, but outlaying around 50 bucks Australian for a beta is rich.
As you say, he is concerned about the "filmrender syndrome", therefore the outlay for this beta in development could go down the drain if something untoward happened with piracy.
I can appreciate the programmers fears, but not at my expense, sorry!

[Dr Mordrid]

Download the Link2 program and select "Register/Retrieve your password for member area" from its menu. From there the site will email you the user name and password for the download.

Penalty? What penalty?

Test project: 60 minute DV type 1 with heavy effects.
TMPGEnc settings: DVD CQ_VBR @6000 kbps

Save to HDD then load to TMPGEnc: 182m 55s
VideoServer to TMPGEnc: 162m 6s
VideoServer to MC stanadalone: 138m 21s

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

There will be a free trial download available in about two weeks. I'm waiting for it before spending my € 25. I certainly would not spend it for an early beta, especially as the guy makes his web site user unfriendly, which is not exactly confidence-building.

[colinbr]

> Edwin took over maintaining the AVISynth code base when Ben
> Rudiak-Gould disappeared from the online scene back in 2000.

There is also a version of Avisynth which includes much of the stability improvements which Edwin made but has other (more?)features. The latest version is dated 26th September 2002.

The project home page is

http://www.avisynth.org/

and on sourceforge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2/

Colin

[Dr Mordrid]

Frameserving AVISynth from a base app to an encoder only works when the base app is Premiere or FlaskMPEG because the AVISynth export plugin only works in those programs.

I don't see any efforts by those on SourceForge to offer an updated Premiere (or MSPro) export plugin, so it looks like only VideoTools is maintaining that very important part of the package.

As such AVISynth doesn't work frameserving from MSPro to an external application. It only works frameserving from HDD to an editging app like MSPro, similar to what Link2 does but with less compatability with newer apps.

Dr. Mordrid