I have converted a couple of animations to .mp4 for personal use and was wondering if I could post them, do I need to get in contact with the artist to see if they approve?
Topic: What's the policy on .mp4 conversions of flash files?
Posted under General
You should only post conversions of flash animations that are not interactive. Check the supported filetypes and Help: Image Quality before trying to upload anything.
We do allow filetype conversions of animated content, because almost all formats have their ups and downs and differend compatibility in past and future. We do still require that the conversions are made with care and look proper and aren't just stuttery compressionfests with recording software and mouse visible and I'm usually personally trying to maintain that quality on this site.
Flash files can contain wide variety of things, so sometimes conversion process isn't as simple as recording the playback. e.g. animation made with vector graphics could be rendered double the resolution as you are converting vectors into bitmap, however if the flash animation is already bitmap like JPG image sequence, then resolution of assets should be kept the same.
Also as protip for anyone who simply wants to have video versions of flashes for personal use, Newgrounds Swivel is definitely the best tool. Renders almost all flashes correctly, no frame drops or framerate missmatches, correct aspect ratio detection, multiple formats (I personally use lossless AVI to handle the file with ffmpeg later myself, needs -c:v rawvideo before -i) and still updated. Only fall back to Flash projector+Dxtory in cases where some specific flash file has some problems rendering with Swivel but that's far between.
MP4 format is not currently supported on the site, you can check on earlier mentioned e621:supported_filetypes for supported filetypes as that page will be updated to reflect currently supported formats, current ones are Flash (swf), APNG, WebM (VP8/VP9) and GIF.
MP4 was not supported by Firefox back when site implemented WebM support and even now, MPEG LA licensing of h264 and h265 can apply on both website and software, where successor h265 is only supported by Safari right now and has much stricter terms. Hopefully the site at some point get h264 MP4 support, but right now we go by this and VP9/Opus WebM is highly preferred with these kind of conversions as it provides as good if better quality for bitrate compared to h265 MP4, but is completely free format which is widely supported (excluding Apple and Safari) and even used by big names like Youtube and Netflix for this reason.
felix_nermix said:
You should only post conversions of flash animations that are not interactive. Check the supported filetypes and Help: Image Quality before trying to upload anything.
Conversions of interactive flashes are also accepted, but these do require much more special care when doing conversions as that does require making some subjective decisions on what is assumed to be artists vision and intent and making sure that stuff like UI and cursor doesn't show up as these are not part of the animation but rather tool for user to interact with the animation which is no longer a factor and also upkeeping quality when technically making the content longer and thus requiring more filesize.
Here are couple good examples I can think of of interactive flash to video conversions:
post #1022883 post #1925666 post #2239844 post #1344057
First example H0rs3 did start to do webm files themselves later on and are actually keeping to similar format themselves.
Second example Zonkpunch did change from flash to video, but they do still make somewhat looped content like this just with extra UI for lenght of current section, which is much harder to demand from conversions.
Third example likkezg did actually release all of the videos in the flash seperately, however we do have 5 same base rule for this reason as posting 30+ video files from same base animation would be ridiculous spam, so matching the segments and transitions from flash file is next best option.
Technically fourth example from Lapatte isn't interactive, but the video conversion is still omitting interactive buttons from start and end while (as you don't need start and repeat buttons on video as that's part of the player) still keeping artists watermark intact and artist did actually approve this conversion so much so that they link it from their original submission page.
Updated
mairo said:
MP4 format is not currently supported on the site, you can check on earlier mentioned e621:supported_filetypes for supported filetypes as that page will be updated to reflect currently supported formats, current ones are Flash (swf), APNG, WebM (VP8/VP9) and GIF.
The interesting thing to me is that filetype:mp4 is in the autosuggestions list (but returns no results). Is that future planning, or just a workaround for some problem?
savageorange said:
The interesting thing to me is that filetype:mp4 is in the autosuggestions list (but returns no results). Is that future planning, or just a workaround for some problem?
That's most likely as the software that current site uses has base support for MP4, WebM and Ugoiras (which is why filetype:zip is also a thing).
So it's technically possible, but site coder and other higher ups need to figure out the support from technical standpoint (can say immidiately that h265 support is a joke at this point, but it was acceptable format during extremely early beta of the current site) and the possible licensing issues with the formats (could be a reason why almost all boorus, chans and rule34 sites exclusively support webm only and e621 is not a small site to just go under radar). Additionally if/when MP4 gets supported, I would love to have the feature request for samples to be granded, so that it wouldn't matter for people if the post says MP4 or WebM and could watch either one (forum #261460, pretty similar to Derpibooru which only accepts WebM but embeds secondary stream which is MP4 so that everything works on apple devices). Additionally ruling on how will older converted content which originates below 100MB MP4 will be handled as I can already see another tumblr raw situation othervice and I can assure that nobody dealing with shit wants another tumblr raw situation.
Ugoira support would also be so amazing, simply because conversion of JPG image sequence is pain no matter the conversion format, but zip is apparently a nightmare to support without all sorts of security issues and pixiv isn't exactly friendly with sites ripping content from them.
mairo said:
We do allow filetype conversions of animated content, because almost all formats have their ups and downs and differend compatibility in past and future. We do still require that the conversions are made with care and look proper and aren't just stuttery compressionfests with recording software and mouse visible and I'm usually personally trying to maintain that quality on this site.
Flash files can contain wide variety of things, so sometimes conversion process isn't as simple as recording the playback. e.g. animation made with vector graphics could be rendered double the resolution as you are converting vectors into bitmap, however if the flash animation is already bitmap like JPG image sequence, then resolution of assets should be kept the same.Also as protip for anyone who simply wants to have video versions of flashes for personal use, Newgrounds Swivel is definitely the best tool. Renders almost all flashes correctly, no frame drops or framerate missmatches, correct aspect ratio detection, multiple formats (I personally use lossless AVI to handle the file with ffmpeg later myself, needs -c:v rawvideo before -i) and still updated. Only fall back to Flash projector+Dxtory in cases where some specific flash file has some problems rendering with Swivel but that's far between.
MP4 format is not currently supported on the site, you can check on earlier mentioned e621:supported_filetypes for supported filetypes as that page will be updated to reflect currently supported formats, current ones are Flash (swf), APNG, WebM (VP8/VP9) and GIF.
MP4 was not supported by Firefox back when site implemented WebM support and even now, MPEG LA licensing of h264 and h265 can apply on both website and software, where successor h265 is only supported by Safari right now and has much stricter terms. Hopefully the site at some point get h264 MP4 support, but right now we go by this and VP9/Opus WebM is highly preferred with these kind of conversions as it provides as good if better quality for bitrate compared to h265 MP4, but is completely free format which is widely supported (excluding Apple and Safari) and even used by big names like Youtube and Netflix for this reason.Conversions of interactive flashes are also accepted, but these do require much more special care when doing conversions as that does require making some subjective decisions on what is assumed to be artists vision and intent and making sure that stuff like UI and cursor doesn't show up as these are not part of the animation but rather tool for user to interact with the animation which is no longer a factor and also upkeeping quality when technically making the content longer and thus requiring more filesize.
Here are couple good examples I can think of of interactive flash to video conversions:
post #1022883 post #1925666 post #2239844 post #1344057
First example H0rs3 did start to do webm files themselves later on and are actually keeping to similar format themselves.
Second example Zonkpunch did change from flash to video, but they do still make somewhat looped content like this just with extra UI for lenght of current section, which is much harder to demand from conversions.
Third example likkezg did actually release all of the videos in the flash seperately, however we do have 5 same base rule for this reason as posting 30+ video files from same base animation would be ridiculous spam, so matching the segments and transitions from flash file is next best option.
Technically fourth example from Lapatte isn't interactive, but the video conversion is still omitting interactive buttons from start and end while (as you don't need start and repeat buttons on video as that's part of the player) still keeping artists watermark intact and artist did actually approve this conversion so much so that they link it from their original submission page.
Oh ok, imma just put a drive link here and let smarter people handle this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufdG8WOzIsuX5sEimmbIKWru0zuui1mg/view?usp=sharing
zoidbergfann1 said:
Oh ok, imma just put a drive link here and let smarter people handle this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufdG8WOzIsuX5sEimmbIKWru0zuui1mg/view?usp=sharing
Would you share a link to the flash file?
felix_nermix said:
Would you share a link to the flash file?
zoidbergfann1 said:
Oh ok, imma just put a drive link here and let smarter people handle this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufdG8WOzIsuX5sEimmbIKWru0zuui1mg/view?usp=sharing
Couple things I do have to admire is that the dimensions are 3x from original and that you are using the loop of unknotting from the flash which isn't normally visible. Also quality is great, altough in this case it is much better to do the encoding from the source flash rather than already lossy file.