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Hi,
I am a member. I usually just go to the full video directly. But after watching some preview videos, I realized that some of the preview videos are clearly at better quality than the full match videos (for example Submission 34). That is quite a surprise and disappointment. Free previews at better quality? If the preview can be made at that quality, the full match can be made at even better quality (or at least at the same quality), no?There are also many full match videos with huge black borders around them, that cut down on the size of the real video making resolution poorer. Also during full screen play, the video just does not occupy the whole screen, a lot of the the screen estate was filled by that huge border, for example, street mat 3. That is just not very satisfying especially if you are already watching the match on a smaller screen. Any particular reasons for doing this? Thanks.
The issue with the full video is that it’s longer and therefore much more consumptive of bandwidth; the longer the video and the higher the quality the more expensive per GB it is to stream. Having said that, we are just today finishing adding the last few matches (Xtra! section) and intend to go back over matches one by one and see what we can do to enhance the picture but figured it was better to just get stuff online first. What we’ll probably end up doing is making the online view slightly better and the downloaded version pristine (although that means it’ll take a long time to download).
Oh and the reason for the black borders is that over 20 years the videos have been shot in a vast variety of formats from Hi8 to Digital8 to half a dozen other formats with future matches now at the bleeding-sharp, bandwidth-expensive 4K.
It’ll be an ongoing process but black bars in general are always needed to compensate for the fact that older formats were square and newer formats are rectangular; to make up for that your choices are to distort the video to fit, or to put bars there. That’s why you’ll see older movies that way when played on new formats.
And to think 8K is already out! LOL
But we will continuously improve the image as much as we can, ongoing. If we improve it too much, people complain that it takes too long to play (it’s not playing! nothing works! nothing plays! you guys are thieves!) and then if we lower the quality so that it plays fast people complain about that. LOL Understandable, but given that the viewing is being paid for by minute (if we had a pay per minute feature we could play at high res but it would cost a fortune to watch) we try to ride the line.
Thank you for your quick reply. I really appreciate it. I also appreciated that you try to get the videos out ASAP and improve the quality later.
Regarding the borders, I understand that if they were shot at the old format of 4:3, to see the complete videos without distortion there will be borders on the left and right (since the screen is usually 16:9), but vertically it should fill up completely. For movies shot at HD, the ratio should already be at 16:9 so no borders are needed. In fact, many member videos are working just like that, and that is great. But what we are seeing is that there are borders in all four directions in some videos no matter what format they were shot at and I think they could be improved.
Many of the newer videos that were obviously shot at full HD (at least) were streamed at a quality lower than 480p DVD (I know this since I owned many BWN DVDs through the years). If you want to limit the quality to save the bandwidth cost, I can understand that. Maybe you can have two tiers of membership, with the higher cost one streaming at full HD quality for people like me who can spot the difference immediately and who can appreciate the difference.
But I wish you can at least offer your best quality version (be them 1080P (2K) or 2016p (4k)) for the download to own videos. Really, your wrestlers are so hot and they spend hrs in the gym to sculpt that beautiful body, they deserve to be seen in the glory of full HD quality (or full DVD quality for older videos). It would be a pity if their great works are only shown to customers in low quality version. To be honest, at the current quality, I will not pay for any download.
Sorry to be critical, but I really like to see the service improved.
I think that distinction is a pretty reasonable one and at least at first, that’s what we’ll go for: higher quality for downloads and lower for the binge memberships.
The reason for the oddities and anomalies is that sometimes ripping various titles through mass-encoding applies one standard to something that doesn’t need it or applies it twice so as to avoid having to do them each one by one by one which would have had the site debut in the year 3015. LOL
We will soon start going through them and seeing what we can improve though and to start with I think the download customers will likely be willing to wait for the long download times to own the pristine versions.
Again, thanks for the quick reply and your willingness to listen.
Not to sound cliché or cheesy, but what you are making is a piece of gay erotic history. Not just that you are the only black wrestling company, your products IMO had much better quality than all the other gay wrestling companies out there. Your willingness to bring some cinematic elements to the production is wonderful. Whether people like it or not, it sets you above the others.
No matter whether or not you would bring your best quality videos to the customers for some practical reasons, you should carefully archive all your works digitally at their best quality with proper backup. In the future, as new formats arise, you just re-encode them as you already have the best version, and your works will not be lost.
As a side note, I read that the new H.265 format, which was designed for online delivery of hi-def videos, is more efficient than older H.264 format, meaning that given the same quality of compression, the H.265 will result in half the file size of the old H.264, or given the same final file size, H.265 will result in much better quality. Maybe you can look into that, or maybe you are already using it?
Interesting; we’re currently searching for experts on compression I’ll make sure to bring that up. Once the final video gets added tonight, we’re going to look at moving all of the raw footage from tape to hard drive (we still have reams of old physical tapes!) but boy it sure is scary; with a tape, it may go bad but you can splice it. With digital footage, of course we have multiple backups and on the cloud as well but in theory it could all be zapped. Appreciate the thoughts regarding the legacy and quality and I completely agree.
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