[Bryant]

Welcome, WinSuperSite readers! For those of you redirected here from Paul Thurrott's article, this page is where you can find the M6 Aurora he used as his DreamScene background. We plan on releasing other dreams as time goes on. For information on the general guidelines I found to be helpful when creating dreams which are gentle on a processor, check this thread

GreenReaper, on Jan 14 2007, 12:59 AM, said:

I would suggest testing to see which format performs better, at a variety of resolutions. It may be that MPEG decompression is worse in terms of file size but better in terms of performance. It may conversely be the case that WMV is better in all respects - Microsoft would certainly like us to think so, though even there they note that "because they are more sophisticated, VC-1 and H.264 are both more complex to decode than MPEG-2".

Just remember not all potential users will have a quad-core 3Gb monster PC, and it's meant to be a background. Sharper is the enemy of smooth.

Perfect way to introduce a video I wasn't in the mood to encode (quality would always hit the fan). Unless I decide to encode it in a lossless codec not found in Windows by default, you guys will get this video the way it is.

Download: WMV version
(Thanks to Adam for the name and to Rafael for killing his precious time trying to find a way to encode it without deviating from native Windows codecs despite having no success. Thanks also goes to Stan for capturing the frames and to me for looping it, as well as to Karl for providing me with his Windows Media Encoder template so that I could create a high quality encoded version.)

The unencoded dream extracts to a painful 583 MB. Keeping it playing probably isn't a safe idea if you do lots of hard-drive-intensive work. If you really need an uncompressed version of the video, please PM me. I'll pass the link if I still have any bandwidth left.

[BoyToy]

Karl's reduced-size WMV version - the link wont work.. can you fix it pliz? and the download speed is so slow..

[Bryant]

BoyToy, on Jan 16 2007, 01:36 PM, said:

Karl's reduced-size WMV version - the link wont work.. can you fix it pliz? and the download speed is so slow..

Ask karl. The link worked when I redid my post, so I don't know what he did. Maybe he's redoing the aurora? :-s

My link maxes out my connection, so I don't know what you mean by "slow". Maybe it's the fact that it's a 90MB download?

[Karl]

Having resigned my position from the staff, I no longer have webspace on AXP. Hence the dead link.

And Bryant, is there any chance for a higher quality vesion to be encoded with that WMV profile I sent you?

[Bryant]

Karl, on Jan 16 2007, 02:32 PM, said:

Having resigned my position from the staff, I no longer have webspace on AXP. Hence the dead link.

And Bryant, is there any chance for a higher quality vesion to be encoded with that WMV profile I sent you?

Let me toss WME onto my vista installation.

[Bryant]

Done. Now you guys have a WMV and RAW

[Karl]

by higher quality, I was kind of hoping for higher resolution. But no matter.

[Bryant]

Karl, on Jan 16 2007, 10:09 PM, said:

by higher quality, I was kind of hoping for higher resolution. But no matter.

Higher resolution thanks to a scale-up wouldn't have been any better than encoding it as-is.

[BoyToy]

TY

[CoLD-FiRe]

Erm...
Why was the Widescreen version removed?

I downloaded it before it was taken down (THANK GOD)

[Joel]

Whoa! This amazingly awersome!! I don't know how you did it, but absolutely AMAZING job!! Thanks a million for posting!!

[Bryant]

CoLD-FiRe, on Jan 18 2007, 09:57 AM, said:

Erm...
Why was the Widescreen version removed?

I downloaded it before it was taken down (THANK GOD)

The widescreen version is an unenhanced upscale of the 800x600 version, so I'm removing it again from your post as there is literally no difference between the two. In fact, the widescreen one might be worse.

I'll have a much bigger widescreen one up soon.

[CoLD-FiRe]

Hmm, Well the difference was that the link above is a 4:3 ratio. So you will have ugly black bars on each side of the screen.
As long as you upload a widescreen version again soon…

Edit:
Oh and the widescreen version uses the same amount of CPU as the 800x600. And totally fills up me screen rez 1680x1050.

[Bryant]

CoLD-FiRe, on Jan 19 2007, 05:02 AM, said:

Hmm, Well the difference was that the link above is a 4:3 ratio. So you will have ugly black bars on each side of the screen.
As long as you upload a widescreen version again soon…

Edit:
Oh and the widescreen version uses the same amount of CPU as the 800x600. And totally fills up me screen rez 1680x1050.

You can stretch the video, pal.. I'm running it on a 1920x1200 screen and there isn't any stretch artifacting.

[CoLD-FiRe]

I wasn’t aware that you could stretch the video.
My bad,
Thanks anyway Bryant.