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[dreamlock]

[Updates Section]
(Info about changes/updates in the thread.)

• Jan. 14: Added 40 edited subms. as well as updated the honorary mentions list.
• Dec. 28: Added 15 edited subms.
• Dec. 27: Added 4 edited submissions.

Prologue
So it begins.

Thread theme song

In celebration of the launch of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One: I, dreamlock, present The Return, a community project to be released in this WebM thread.

I want to share with you, the community, a compilation of edited moments and stories. This thread is also intended to spread awareness of the WebM video file format and its advantages.

What is WebM? (see the FAQ section in the third post for more information.)

WebM is an open media file format designed for the web developed by Google, based on technology they got when they acquired On2 Technologies. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska media container.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/
http://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/
http://wiki.webmproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM

And...

The Return
An introduction video to the project, mainly focused on the return to Los Santos, hence the title.
Youtube [3:30]

WebM compilation:

Medium: (11-30 sec)

• Forever Alone
  
• Smooth Criminal
  
• The Ghost

Long: (30 sec+ and footage part of a series goes here as well.)

• Across the Moon [1:22]
  
• Around the World [4:06]
  
• Boat on a Beach [1:33]
  
• Bravebike [0:39]
  
• Buddy [5:20]
  
• Burn in Hell [1:00]
  
• Die Hard [0:45]
  
• Falling Down [0:43]
  
• Get Lucky [0:55]
  
• Gotta catch ‘em all [3:56]
  
• Harlem Shake [0:43]
  
• GTA V: Pokemon Edition [2:46]
  
• GTA V: Star Trek Edition [1:44]
  
• Let Me Hit It [0:46] (NSFW)
  
• Loneliness [1:04] Backup: pomf
  
• Mr. Sneakman's Movie - Episode One [0:20]
  
• Murphy's Law - Lesson One [0:26]
  
• Murphy's Law - Lesson Two [0:33]
  
• Murphy's Law - Lesson Three [0:18]
  
• Never give up [4:06]
  
• Nyan [1:13] (easter egg spoilers!)
  
• Obey and Survive [3:35]
  
• On the Open Road [0:40]
  
• Parking [0:49]
  
• Pretty Woman [1:06]
  
• Rejected [3:20]
  
• Road Rage - Episode One [0:50]
  
• Road Rage - Episode Two [0:53]
  
• Road Rage - Episode Three [1:00]
  
• Skyscraper Opera [3:16] (Disclaimer: the sound being very low in the beginning of the video is in fact intentional in order to simulate distance.)
  
• Sudden Death [2:34]
  
• The Agent [1:08]
  
• The Angry Man - Episode One [0:59]
  
• The Creepy Man [0:32]
  
• The Duel [1:39]
  
• The Escape [0:42]
  
• The Feminist [0:32]
  
• The Great Brawl [2:55]
  
• The Great Migration [2:35]
  
• The Heroes of Los Santos - Episode One [0:29]
  
• The Heroes of Los Santos - Episode Two [0:20]
  
• The Hunt [0:40]
  
• The Incredible Hulk - Episode One [0:35]
  
• The Incredible Hulk - Episode Two [0:26]
  
• The Incredible Hulk - Episode Three [0:21]
  
• The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment - Chapter One [0:50]
  
• The Mating Season [1:06]
  
• The Mysteries of Los Santos - Episode One [0:36]
  
• The Paleto Bay Memorial [2:09]
  
• The Pusher - Episode One [0:17]
  
• The Pusher - Episode Two [0:30]
  
• The Stampede [0:59]
  
• Things that I hate - Episode One [0:26]
  
• Under the Sea [3:09] (easter egg spoilers!)

Honorable mentions:

This is a list of videos/gameplay that I recommend that you watch due to its well-made and (often) very enjoyable content. This list will also be updated later on.

Here are links to the original videos – I kindly request that you pay them a visit as they deserve recognition for their work. (As do the rest of you that have gameplay that is a part of this compilation, of course.)

• A Whole New (Gen) World | GTA 5 Aladdin Song by 8-BIT-BASTARD [2:40]
  
• Grand Theft Auto V - Alive (PS4) by The Bit Trip [2:00]
  
• GTA 5 Workout Song by TheyCallMeConor [1:47]
  
• Lip Reading NPCs in Grand Theft Auto 5 by AbsolutePixel [1:51]
  
• Los Santos By Night by The XXI [1:57]
  
• Most Wanted Trailer #1 (2015) - GTA 5 Next Gen Movie HD by Commandoflauge [2:19]
  
• Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens - Remake/Parody in GTA V by Powerlight-13 [1:18]
  
• The Beauty of Blaine County by SA96HD [2:32]
  
• The Streets of Los Santos by SA96HD [3:09]
  
• Toy Soldiers | GTA 5 Tilt Shift / Miniature Army by 8-BIT BASTARD [2:55]
  
• Wildlife Documentary - Into the Deep by 8-BIT-BASTARD [13:37]

Timelapse [Series]

• The Beautiful Game by ThirstyHyena [3:04]
  
• Winter Wonderland | GTA 5 Snow Time Lapse | 60fps by 8-BIT-BASTARD [1:53]

 

[dreamlock]

The Death of Jacob Miller [3:11]

Note that the following article is entirely fictional and was only written to serve as a background story to the video above for context purposes. It is optional if you want to read it or not.

Man dies after being left lying in the street and run over by fellow citizens; graphic and disturbing video released.

By D. Lock, Freelance Writer, Daily Globe
Published: December 8, 2014, 13:37 PM

LOS SANTOS — Shortly after 5pm during rush hour on Friday afternoon, passers-by ignored a man near Swiss Street in the Downtown area that had been the victim of a hit-and-run incident according to anonymous eye-witnesses involving a police cruiser in a high speed chase of a five-star suspect.

The victim who has been identified as Jacob Miller, 43, had been left lying in the street for a total of fourteen minutes before Jeremy Leon, a tourist from France, arrived at the scene on the way back to his hotel. He had been visiting popular tourist attractions to try out the recording feature of his brand-new Eyefind Sight glasses and was shocked as he saw people passing by without a second glance.

As his own phone was out of battery he tried to convince nearby pedestrians to call 911 or let him borrow their phone, but to his dismay they refused. After a few minutes of hopelessness, he found a phone lying on the side-walk, which was later to be seized by the LSPD as evidence as it was believed to belong to the suspect from the high speed car chase that led to the victim being hit.

As he made the call he was horrified when he saw a car suddenly run over Miller and speed away as if nothing had happened. During the course of less than a minute more cars and even a bus drove over his arms, legs, torso and skull. Jeremy confronted the drivers by shouting and begging them to stop, but the nightmare continued. He called for help from other pedestrians nearby, but no one responded and some even ran away in a hurry.

Less than a minute later when paramedics arrived they evidently increased speed only to run over Miller once more before leaving the scene.

Jeremy becoming increasingly desperate was approached by a man in a black hood only moments later that carried Miller and brought him to the Pillbox Hill Medical Center which was within walking distance where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Unfortunately, there is no recording of the attempt to rescue Miller as Jeremy’s Eyefind Sight had suddenly malfunctioned and shut down before the man in the hood arrived. This unknown hero has since disappeared without a trace.

Over 40 people were caught on camera ignoring Miller as he lay dying in the street. He was run over 14 times according to the LSPD who says they have reviewed Jeremy Leon’s recording as well as security camera footage that captured the aftermath. They have been unable to present any footage that recorded Miller first being hit and say that it has been lost due to unfortunate hardware malfunctions and all backups were stolen in recent break-ins.

Jacob Miller leaves behind a wife and four children. His family and relatives have failed in all of their attempts to get the LSPD to take responsibility for the death of their loved one.

The LSPD has previously stated that they are not seeking any suspects at this time and no arrests have been made.

Jacob Miller’s death has caused outrage and worldwide news reports with people taking to Lifeinvader and Bleeter to condemn the sheer lack of humanity by people that could have saved his life as displayed in the video that was uploaded on Jeremy Leon’s Lifeinvader page on Sunday evening. A petition called “Justice for Jacob” that was created currently stands at over 100 000 signatures.

The video has been linked to below, but we must warn you. The footage is graphic and disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.

Link

Jacob’s memorial service is scheduled for December 25 at the Maze Bank Arena and thousands are expected to attend and show their support. The LSPD have been banned from the event and instead security will be handled by private contractors.

Notice about content ownership & copyright infringement

All footage included in this compilation is owned by the respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended. All images, audio and video clips are the sole property of their respective owners. This is for WebM awareness and entertainment purposes only.

I will submit to ALL requests to remove links to submissions that you have originally uploaded and don't want to be a part of this compilation. However, I will fiercely, albeit in vain, challenge attempts at taking down footage due to the music used as I believe as long as credit is properly appointed and the motive is not financial gain then there is less reason to stop the music from being spread to others.

Tutorials
(Courtesy of webmproject. I’ll be updating this section later.)

The Tools:
http://www.webmproject.org/tools/
I personally recommend XMedia Recode for converting.

The Guides/Tips:
https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php?title=WebM
(slightly outdated, but useful information.)

The Hosts:
• Gfycat (sWebM as they don’t support audio streams here.)
• Pomf (both audio/non-audio.)
• Youtube

Project Background – short overview

This project has gone through several stages.

• Research & planning
• Recording & storing content
• Editing & converting into source format/codec (.mp4/.h264)
• Quality Assurance (which some corporations really should be investing more money and time into doing these days….)
• Editing, processing & converting into WebM (.vp8)
  And finally:
• Quality Assurance & staggered release

Nov 18 – Nov 30
The workflow for the first two weeks was pretty much just all about downloading footage and recording streams on a laptop and stationary PC.

Dec 1 – Dec 26
In the beginning of December the editing process began. Adobe Premiere Pro was used to edit and cut down footage and then they were encoded into the source format .mp4(.h264) and sorted into folders for future processing.

The reason for this is because Adobe Premiere Pro cannot import or encode .webm(VP8/VP9).

Current list of supported file formats by Premiere

I ended up encoding everything in the source format (usually .mp4) before finally converting to WebM using XMedia Recode or the Adobe WebM Plugin.

Tools used for this project:

• Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 free 30-day trial.
  
• XMedia Recode
  
• Adobe WebM plugin for Photoshop/Premiere by Brendan Bolles
  
• Open Broadcaster Software to record streams
  
• Twitchtools to save archived twitch.tv footage
  
• Google Chrome & Mozilla Firefox with the Video Download Helper add-on to save Youtube videos.
  
• And a patience level of over 9000.

All footage obtained from:

• Gfycat
• NeoGAF
• Pomf.se
• Reddit/r/grandtheftautov
• Twitch.tv
• Vimeo
• Youtube
• Xboxclips

Fun facts:

• This is the first time I submit a thread on NeoGAF
• Over one month in the making. (first draft written nov 17th.)
• Footage originates from 18th November (release) up until 26th December 2014
• Put gaming on hold since project began
• Have a fulltime job and devoted most of my free time on evenings towards this project.
• I have only 4 weeks of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 experience and learned as I worked.

 

[dreamlock]

Connecting the GTA V PS4/XB1/PC(soon) Community @Neogaf

I believe that forums in general, not just NeoGAF, need to collaborate and link to other threads more relevant to the discussions and inform others that they exist to avoid going off-topic. For popular releases, like this one, it is obvious that there will be several threads to keep an eye on. My suggestion is that larger OTs link to each other in this manner as it will be an easier way to transfer discussion to the proper threads if people can quickly access them through every OT.

GTA V NG |OT| You forget a thousand things every day, make sure Chicago is one of 'em
General GTA V gameplay discussion

GTA V: Online OT
Stop on by the Online OT if you ever feel like taking the fight to the streets with a crew.

GTA V (New-Gen) Snapmatic / Photo thread
Selfies or Photos that you want to share? Then this is the place for you.

The PC version OT (modded to include superior graphics and additional content) will be included here on or around the PC release date (March 24, 2015).

About WebM - Frequently Asked Questions
(Courtesy of www.webmproject.org/faq with edits made by dreamlock.)

What is WebM?

WebM is an open media file format designed for the web developed by Google, based on technology they got when they acquired On2 Technologies. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska media container.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/
http://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/
http://wiki.webmproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM

What is sWebM? Isn’t .GIF better because it is currently more popular?

A silent WebM is a WebM that is muted or contains no audio streams. Note that it is not a currently existing format, and just a term that I use to define it.

“CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

We need a replacement for the .gif. It’s outdated, it’s slow and inefficient.

I’m glad that gfycat, and finally imgur have realized this as well and begun a slow, but steady “transition” into html5 video.

I’m referring to GFY and GIFV. See below:

http://gfycat.com/about
https://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/

I do not wish to see us end up in an era of exclusively silent WebMs however, so I have pushed it as a video file format with audio coding support for this project, because that is what it really is.

Although, I can see .swebm becoming a thing in the future I believe that the true successor of the image format .gif might possibly be WebP, which is a sister project of WebM. More information can be found below.

What is WebP?

WebP is an image format employing both lossy and lossless compression. It is currently developed by Google, based on technology acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies. As a derivative of the VP8 video format, it is a sister project to the WebM multimedia container format. WebP-related software is released under a BSD license.

Google has proposed using WebP for animated images as an alternative to the popular GIF format, citing the advantages of 24-bit color with transparency, combining frames with lossy and lossless compression in the same animation, and as well as support for seeking to specific frames.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/faq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

What’s Great About WebM?

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supports 4K resolution! (VP8+)
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

OK, what’s bad about WebM then?

I’ll not be ignorant and avoid disclosing anything negative, because like everything else it has both pros and cons.

• Apple does not support WebM. There is no hardware VP8 decoding in iPhones. Without hardware acceleration this means that watching more demanding WebMs would quickly drain battery life and lead to choppiness/stuttering.
• Not enough major corporations are pushing for the format on mobile devices.
• VP8 is better than Theora but inferior compared to H.264. VP9 is in development, and it will be interesting to see how it compares to H.265.
• There is little awareness about the format and its advantages, something I aim to try and change with this thread.

How do I play WebM files?

WebM video plays directly in your web browser using HTML5. No plug-ins are needed, but you must install a modern web browser that supports HTML5 and WebM.
All you need is a supported web browser or media player.

Safari/IE requires plugins or separate codecs to play WebM. There’s no native support.
http://www.webmproject.org/ie/

If you’re trying to watch from a iPhone, then you’re out of luck if the footage is exclusively hosted on a site like pomf which doesn’t encode in both .h264 and .vp8 like gfycat or Youtube.

Is the WebM project owned by Google or is it independent?

WebM is an open-source project sponsored by Google. We hope you'll get involved!

Please explain how WebM is "royalty-free."

Some video codecs require content distributors and manufacturers to pay patent royalties to use the intellectual property within the codec. WebM and the codecs it supports (VP8 video and Vorbis audio) require no royalty payments of any kind.

You can do whatever you want with the WebM code without owing money to anybody. For more information, see the License page.

The Future of WebM

It’s almost been four years since a very surprising post from Chromium's blog announced that Google Chrome will drop support for H.264 HTML5 videos.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies."

And then...an unending silence. Nothing has happened, so one can only assume that Google changed their mind and that it was an empty promise. Perhaps they had hopes that their announcement would increase the WebM format’s adoption by the general public, but as history shows they were wrong to come to that assumption. Other than Gfycat and YouTube, few other sites convert their videos to WebM. Why would anyone spend time and money to convert videos when they could simply use Adobe’s Flash player?

After all, Adobe Flash doesn't support WebM and that's the second empty promise:

"As Kevin Lynch mentioned today at Google I/O, we are excited to include the VP8 video codec in Flash Player in an upcoming release, which will help provide users with seamless access to high quality video content on all of their Internet-connected devices,"

This was announced in their blog and was posted on May 19, 2010. That’s almost five years ago. Five. Years(!). That’s a long time, yet no results have been produced.

Yes, Adobe didn't support the VP8 codec, and Adobe Flash still remains H.264-only. This goes for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Windows Phone and Apple’s iOS and Safari browser as well.

Sadly, despite 2015 being only days away WebM is pretty much non-existent in the mobile space and that's where the real future lies. Even if Android supports WebM, there aren't that many devices with hardware acceleration for the format.

From the WebM project blog:

“VP9 development began eighteen months ago. In the short time since, according to our internal tests, we've produced a codec that shows video quality that is slightly better than HEVC (H.265) and is 50% better than VP8 and the best implementations of H.264 high profile.”

http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/07/vp9-lands-in-chrome-dev-channel.html
http://www.webmproject.org/hardware/vp9/

“There can be only one!” you say?

I respectfully disagree as I believe that H.265 and VP9 codecs will be able to co-exist, and only time will tell which one turns out to be more efficient. In my mind, competition is always good for business and a win for the consumers.

Will 2015 be the year of the WebM? We'll just have to wait and see.

Current, and updated list of supporters of the project
http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/

Special thanks:
Google
Microsoft
NeoGAF
Reddit/r/GrandTheftAutoV
Rockstar Games
Rockstar North
R* employees
Sony Computer Entertainment
The WebM Project

And last, but not least:
You. Members of the GTA V Community.

Safe gaming, friends.

Ode to the gif from dreamlock.

I’ll be back.

 

[dreamlock]

.

 

[Tawpgun]

I still don't understand the fascination for webm.