demos /w audio commentary

[40oz]

I was thinking, for the purpose of play testing, what the practicality of uploading a demo or FDA for someone with an included audio recording of my voice with comments that the mapper can listen to while watching to get a clearer indication of what I'm talking about in that particular moment in the demo.

id probably compress it so its not a huge download, but I was concerned about getting the demo and the audio recording to play in sync with each other, as many people use different utilities to playback music and sounds that all work differently than one another.

would it be practical to include the audio recording in a wad as a lump named D_RUNNIN so that it patches the music? I still think it would risk the possibility of going out of sync as some processors might struggle to load a 30+ minute audio file.

does prboom even support mp3 audio?

[plums]

Don't know about MP3, but it does support ogg, so you could bundle in audio that way. Keeping everything in sync could be a problem though, since the music playback is not tied to anything else.

If you don't want to upload the whole thing to YouTube, probably the best idea would be to do it like they used to do Warcraft 3 commentaries. Bundle an mp3/ogg with the lmp (separate file, not in the wad), and in the audio, instruct the listener to pause at the start of the video, and then unpause at a certain time in the audio. As long as the person watching/listening doesn't have any serious performance drops, things will stay relatively in sync.

[Ribbiks]

interesting idea. I'm curious what advantages this would have over the alternatives (e.g. private yt listing, or streaming through something like skype/twitch/whatever).

also for whatever reason my prb+ seems to hate mp3 files, though I think that's an osx/sdl-related thing on my end. As plums mentioned ogg tends to work fine.

[dew]

That sounds terribly inconvenient and unnecessary in the age of stream sites like twitch or hitbox. Why not just narrating your demo/live playthrough there? You'll get perfect sync no matter how the viewers pause or skip.

[Ribbiks]

oh yeah, dew brings up a good point (skipping, pausing, etc). when watching demos through long/difficult/etc maps it's tempting to set playback at 200% speed or higher to cruise through the "boring" parts, this wouldn't be an option in your proposed setup.

[j4rio]

or just make it possible to "chat" during recording with more ports than zdoom so you can type in notes while recording

[40oz]

That's true I didn't really consider pausing, or speeding/slowing. It would really depend on the viewer sticking it out through the whole thing from start to finish.

my computer sucks for streaming which is why I asked. Thought this method might be a bit more convenient for my rig.

[Darch]

You could use Fraps to record a video and then compress it to a smaller size to send.