QoS Player Update

I've still been working on the QoS Player and there have been some improvements:

• Tool tips on Graphical User Interface, including time code on progress/video bar.
• Large enough to be readable on HDTVs.
• Clicking on the progress bar now works correctly.
• There was an error when clicking on earlier time segments of the video.  It was basically impossible to use the progress bar.
• Rewrote code to make it easier to maintain/develop.
• Everything works better due to use of events and listeners as opposed to flags and loops.
• Controls now resize correctly/easier.  scaleX/scaleY are used to make sure the controls are correctly sized.
• YouTube quality control changed to a stepper since the combo box didn't resize correctly.
• Autoscrolling on the playlist pane now works correctly.
• The playlist pane now also shows the length of videos (in HH:MM:SS format).
• Flash quality can now by set by right-clicking on the progress bar when video is paused.
• May add its own stepper later.
• Delay publishing of videos with a PHP file.
• A watermark can be added and displayed over videos.
• Will open a URL when clicked upon.
• It's almost in a workable/releasable state.

 Check it out:  http://lostdata.comuv.com/~qosplayer2/~index2.html

QoS Player

I've been working on a custom YouTube player as an improvement over YouTube's default player.

Its purpose is mainly to make watching video (subtitled or not) easier. The left and right arrow keys rewind and fast forward by ten seconds, respectively. This differs from YouTube's default player settings of rewinding/fast forwarding by ten percent of the video's length.

This might be used in a revived Reactor, but it needs a lot of work to get it to that point. Inserting Toonami interstitials by some method shouldn't be too hard, but keeping track of everything is difficult. The solution may be to simplify it by putting the interstitial/bump code in JavaScript.

The title comes from Quality of Service. It attempts to avoid some of YouTube's more annoying problems. It tries to force YouTube to devote more bandwidth by restarting the video if it loads too slowly. It currently can't be turned off, so this might be a problem for slow connections.

Future features may include: alerting the user when a video finishes loading or allowing the video to fully load before playing (or load to some point before playing).

See keyboard controls and embedded player test @ Lost Data.

(It's surprising that Shinya Arino can beat some of the hardest games ever made, but still fails at the occasional Mario game.)

Frameless Toonami Reactor

(50% less annoying than before.)

The interface for Toonami Reactor 2.5 has been upgraded.  No longer will awful frames cause confusion across multiple browsers.  Now it should work across most browsers, though older versions of Internet Explorer may be problematic.

In addition, several features have been added:

• Video quality can be set and kept across multiple videos.
• Video timing can be adjusted.
• Ads, games, and bumps can all be toggled on or off.
• Obtain a video list just by searching a user's uploads.  Saves a lot of time versus creating new playlists.
• Can now sort playlists/searches.  Important as a lot of playlists are improperly organized.
• The Episode List box will now auto-scroll to the selected video.

Several bugs have been squashed:

• Double-play bug:  This was caused by trying to correct the video quality after it loaded instead of requesting quality with the video.
• Removed auto-play from embed code as it seemed to interfere with the JavaScript auto-play.
• Removed Related Videos from embed code as it tended to get stuck when switching videos.
• Block-skipping:  The player skips a chunk of video when switching videos.  Probably solved or reduced in frequency.  Related either to the embedded auto-play or video timing.

There are still some improvements that could be made:

• Allow the viewer to set how many episodes before a bump.
• Allow two searches/playlists to be merged (there are some difficulties in searching).
• Might even allow two searches/playlists to be "diffed" and "unioned" to add some better logic.
• YouTube also searches comments made by the video poster (or event commentators).  This causes massive problem with searching, so may need a separate Title or Tag Search.

Toonamify your YouTube experience at Toonami Reactor 2.5.

Coming Soon... Eventually

 
(Why, it looks almost exactly the same!)

A frameless version of Toonami Reactor 2.5.  Hopefully, this one will work much better across multiple browsers.

This will replace all other versions because it's a lot sleeker than the framed versions.

(Technically, there will be a couple of iFrames, but those are only for compatibility and loading playlists.)

Related Project: YouTube Viewer

Toonami Reactor 2.5 isn't the only YouTube-related project I've worked on.  The first was a YouTube "Let's Play" viewer that automatically runs through a playlist of videos.  Basically, I hook a laptop up to a TV with a VGA connection (many new HDTVs have them), select someone's playlist, and just let it roll.

Many improvements made in either the YouTube Viewer or Reactor 2.5 are cross-pollinated, so that both function better.  It is essentially a prototype for experimenting with YouTube embedding and managing playlists without worrying about frames or extraneous HTML and JavaScript files.

The YouTube Viewer currently has a few experimental features such as measuring download rate to ensure videos load quickly.  I plan to add a voice synthesizer to read video titles and descriptions, but it will have to be an external program on the viewer's computer.  Any sort of voice synth plug-in will simply be too slow or too simplistic (not enough voices, etc.).

Of course, now I'm working on a "master" YouTube Viewer.  The current one is okay, but I'm trying to make one embeddable in any webpage with minimal hassle, rather than hard coded as it is now.  If it all works out, I might be able to get rid of the frames in Reactor 2.5.

I've also got a JavaScript file that parses and threads comments from YouTube discussions, but I'm still cleaning that one up.

P.S. A bunch of new shows have been added to Reactor 2.5 (WS).  Some of these took a bit of work as not all were in playlists (and one playlist was completely misordered).

Toonami Reactor 2.5 Widescreen

(Now with 50% less resizing!)

After some work, Reactor 2.5 now has a "widescreen" layout.  This should work well considering that YouTube standard definition video is far larger than the original Reactor's tiny streaming content.  The Reactor and navigation panes were moved to the bottom half of the screen to accommodate the change. 

In addition, Toonami promos should now play between episodes of series.  More than that and they risk annoying the viewer.  The promos are randomly selected, so they won't necessarily match any particular time period of Toonami.  There are also "Intro" and "Later" bumpers that activate at the beginning and end of a playlist.

See the Toonami Reactor 2.5 Widescreen version.

Or proceed to the 'old' version of Toonami Reactor.

fsed.sh

After downloading the Toonami Reactor web files from the Internet Archive, I needed to strip out all the Wayback Machine code/markers.  The Wayback Machine added JavaScript code to rewrite HTML links thus maintaining "temporal integrity".  These needed to be removed for Reactor 2.5 to function properly.  Removing them manually would be too time consuming and frustrating.  The application Cygwin provided access to many tools such as sed that allow for bulk replacement of text.  However, sed (or this version on least) can only replace text on a single line.  The solution was to write a custom bash script to replace newline characters ('\n') with the bell character ('\a') and switch back after removing the offending text.  See code:

#!/bin/bash
# fsed.sh
# Name: File sed
# Replaces all newlines with the bell (\a), performs sed,
# then switches back.

regex=$1;
# Shift the argument array, to move the regex value. 
shift
for i in $*
do
  cat $i | tr "\n" "\a" | sed "$regex" | tr "\a" "\n" > $i;
done


Called like this: >fsed.sh "/regex/replace/g" ./*.html
(Of course, this is designed to work on a mass of files.  And it's incredibly dangerous, what with rewriting files and such.  Use caution.)

It's possible there are other escape characters other than the bell that could be used, but it worked well enough at the time.

Reactor v2.5.3231463968 Alpha Gaiden

(It sort of works!)

After some work, I've got a fan-version of Toonami Reactor up and running. It's missing some features currently, but those will be added in gradually.

Why Reactor instead of Jetstream? Because Reactor's layout is easier to copy and YouTube's embedded player comes with a variety of color schemes. Jetstream was all Flash and loaded its files in a most annoying fashion.

YouTube also has the most powerful and complete API of the video hosting services.  Dailymotion has an API as well, but I can't figure out if it allows API access to playlists.

Since it is YouTube, content is somewhat limited due to copyright restrictions. 

On to Reactor 2.5's current capabilities.

What really makes it the Reactor.  Every three minutes:

• Reactor Mindburn pops up on the right-corner ("Reaction") panel and asks a question.
• An "advertisement" is displayed in the Reaction frame/panel. These aren't really ads, but just links to anything interesting related to Toonami or not.
• The Reactor Meltdown plays.

The Reactor runs through a YouTube playlist, allowing a viewer to watch an entire series/set of videos.  The viewer can also play any embeddable YouTube playlist he or she chooses by copying and pasting a playlist ID string in a text box.

Features to add:

• Playing a Toonami intro before the playlist starts.
• Playing an interstitial between every two videos (approximately).  Interstitials include the "blood" graphic.
• An "Up Next" graphic or animation.
• Playing a montage such as "Dreams" or "Mad Rhetoric" between episodes.
• Ditto for video game reviews.
• Finishing a playlist with a "Later" bump.
• The ability to turn some or all features off.

The current layout essentially copies the original Reactor.  However, YouTube allows for video resolutions far larger than the original Reactor's 320x240 Real Video Streaming.  It'd probably be best to move the Reaction frame (where messages and trivia games pop-up) to the bottom-half of the screen, giving more room for video.

Features Probably Never Implemented:

The original Reactor had the episodes keyed in so that a message would appear for a given moment during a video. For instance, during the episode in which Goku launches a Spirit Bomb at Frieza, the Reactor panel might pop-up a message stating: "Goku learned the Spirit Bomb from King Kai in episode ##." Hypothetically, that could be implemented, but it's an awful lot of work that could be wiped out quite easily.

Or Reactor 2.5 could scan the comments section for chronological links and display the comment at the appropriate time...

Other:

The code's a mess.  I wanted to get an initial version out before the end of April, so there's still a lot of clean-up to do along with testing and adding the above-mentioned components.  It should work across all modern browsers and operating systems (I hope; Internet Explore seems to have some major problems).

I know nothing about color schemes or aesthetic taste.  I just picked whatever colors looked okay for text boxes and such.

The hardest part is collecting videos for the Reactor.  Right now, there's only two good playlists on the page.

Check out Reactor 2.5 (Preview).

Toonami Reactor Meltdown

After some time of gathering images, the Reactor Meltdown game has finally been "repaired". As some of us may remember, the Meltdown game was a quiz game similar to Mindburn except the player must guess the person/object/item/place in a slowly-revealed image.

The game was obtained from the Internet Archive with only one image (out of fifty-six) still present. The only image was of Frieza, but it at least provided some information on the proper height and width of acceptable images. Fortunately, most of the questions (stored in separate files) were spidered by the Wayback Machine and preserved.

Play Reactor Meltdown @ Toonami: Lost Data

(Some images look better than others. I was rushed.)

Using the SWFTools package, another fifty-five images were converted to work with the Meltdown game. Now it should function near-identically as it did in the Reactor.

Plans: Toonami Reactor

I plan to reconstitute much of the Reactor from the Internet Archive. The original version used embedded RealPlayer streaming. I'll just replace that with the various embedded video sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion. The Internet Archive didn't pickup the Features section, but that isn't a problem.

Some years ago, I used HTTrack to rip the Features section from Toonami Reactor. The articles had seemed important at the time, so I saved them. Combined with the content from the Internet Archive, it should appear 90% complete.

Toonami Mindburn should work fine, but Toonami Meltdown is missing a lot of files. The Dragon Ball Z games will be added as well. The advertisements and trivia won't be present.

The project is in its infancy, but I hope it works out.