About

About the videos

Video grabbing

The videos used in the "Examples" section of each card/pattern's page were trimmed from recordings of game sessions. Most of the video (PS2, PS3, XBox, PSP, iPhone) was acquired through a High-Definition video recorder (receiving Component Video and Stereo Audio (digital audio, whenever possible)). For older consoles (including Nintendo 64) we used an analog to digital hardware converter (receiving S-Video and Stereo Audio). For Mac OS X and MS Windows games we used video capture software.

All videos used in the site are 30 seconds or less. Among other aspects, this length should allow:

• quickly focusing on the particular aspect in stake;
• possibly checking several examples without compromising the flow of the task being performed;
• reduce the overall bytes transferred;

Once trimmed, videos were resized and uploaded in several resolutions so that it is possible to serve an adequate file size and quality according to the scenario (e.g. inline playing of embedded thumbnail versus playing in full window). Resizing has also been convenient to cope with some specific circumstances (e.g. iPhone scaling to screen resolution and maximum playable resolution).

We opted to host the videos ourselves (i.e., they are maintained and served from the same host where the wiki is hosted). This may be revised in the future but it has shown to be the best approach by now.