And away we go

Whoooo-boy! Well, this is my first attempt at something like this, but ever since Stage6 shut down last month, I've been spinning my head around and around with what to do with all those videos I created. We're talking about reasonably high-definition, high-resolution videos that YouTube and other video sites simply won't support. Even though they are encoded with DIVX, these files are still several hundred MB, and some are even over 1 GB. Many of the videos are over an hour long, and some even over 2 hours (I'm looking at you ,CoP Chapter 5...).

At first, I really didn't want to think about having to re-upload everything. I mean, it took me a VERY long time to get everything up on Stage6 in the first place (several months), and I still have many cutscenes recorded that I haven't even edited and pieced together into comprehensive stories yet, not to mention the cutscenes I have yet to record. At times it has seemed like such an ambitious project, and I constantly wondered if people were even interested to the point that it was worth it. Well, it turns out that a lot of people were just as upset as I was that my videos were no longer available at Stage6. In fact, I received numerous comments from FFXI players that wanted me to get them back up somewhere.

So I've been toying around with different options. Some of my videos have been uploaded to Veoh. I created a channel for the cutscene vids at
http://www.veoh.com/channels/ffxicutscenes
I also wanted to put up those two "This is My Story" videos from Gizmo on Pandemonium that I just can't say enough good things about. Since they weren't part of the cutscene project, I was going to keep them off the channel and just on my regular profile:
http://www.veoh.com/users/lawtechguy

At first, this seemed like a promising option. But once I started uploading the longer vids, I noticed a couple of things:
1. You can only watch a 5 minute preview directly on their website. To view the full video you have to download and install VeohTV and view it that way. Not a super big deal, but still not exactly ideal.
2. If you try to watch in full screen mode, the video quality is HORRIBLE. It's painful to watch my work end up looking like such crap. The only solution is to fully download each video, then open it up in a completely separate viewer like Windows Media Player or the DIVX viewer.

So I'm not exactly back to square one. I mean, I can keep putting them up on Veoh even though I'm not completely happy with them. Or I can go with another idea.....

I'm now looking at VUZE.com, which allows high-def streaming content using BitTorrent protocol. In fact, several people had suggested creating torrents for my videos since they were so darn big. While there is a limited user profile page that links all the videos together, the site encourages users to use magnet links on their own website or blog.

And thus we have arrived to my creation of this page. The goal is to try to start getting my videos on VUZE or another torrent site and organize this blog as a portal to all the videos, as well as keep people updated on where I am with the overall project. If it turns out like I hope, then you will have one very happy lawtechguy!