The Story

Hey all! Zewwy here!

An LGR Thing

This is going to be a pretty short boring post. It’s my birth month so I’m going to be enjoying it as much as possible. This happens to include plenty of LGR watching… if you are unfamiliar with LGR it’s Lazy Game Reviews by Clint, on YouTube. Check out his Channel here….

I don’t know why I’m so addicted to his video… but I am.. good job buddy.

Anyway… LGR has sort of… inspired me, in a sense… that I dusted off the old computer that I built years ago, and not only attempted to get it working…. but attempted to get it working, running all version of windows known to man!

Sadly to say, although I did get MS DOS 6.2, Win 3.11 and Win95 all up and running, I was not able to get the main board drivers or video or sound drivers working on these really old legacy OS’s… So running yes, basic apps, yes… Sound.. no, 256 color…. no… USB…. nope… mouse… nope, just the basic apps on a low res window manager with a keyboard….

However, I did manage to get Windows 98SE and Windows ME almost working 100%! 😀 also lucky for me since these particular old OS were still built ontop of MS DOS, instead of having a dedicated standalone kernel and simply providing a CMD prompt (XP and onward era OS’s). I was just unable to get the network driver going (although I did read on the msfn.org (like this form section) that someone did manage it with custom drivers… but that I have no accomplished myself… yet. I also got XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all running as well (I could only run with generic MS drivers for the video card on Windows 7, and the driver signing enforcement prevented me from being to utilize custom drivers… arg, there is a driver signing tool (self sign) that you can use to self sign the drivers, but I had no success in this as there was no direct guide in what files you had to sign and how as the app was not very intuitive, and no guides telling you exactly what to do was found.)

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent here and I will cover this awesome bare metal machine in more details in another post… or video (ooo is that foreshadowing???)

So I ended up ordering a huge box of old DOS/PC games after completing this build… I mean I got an old machine running 98/ME/XP/Vista/Win7 The range is unbelievable, I can review so many games from 1 machine! Bare metal! none of this VM stuff, or DosBox… Although emulators such as DOSBox do have some amazing features and enhancements… I just love hearing the spin of those old drives, and just simply installing it directly from a CD-ROM and all that jazz.

When I got my box, I just had to grab my camera in LGR fashion, and record my excitement and joy of getting this huge box of games. Out of this mystery box the first magical game I pulled out was….. Micorsoft Soccer 95!

So yeah! I made my first game review video, just like LGR… obviously nowhere near as awesome as LGR… but it’s a start.

First Software Tests

Now clearly there were a couple things I wanted to take care of and the first thing and that was covering the product ID of the game… I wanted to blur it… but.. I googled for open source video editors and the first I came across was OpenShot, now OpenShot does not have that feature built in (Bluring an area of the screen) which I felt lacking, then I noticed whenever I would load my video footage of even a couple minutes my CPU would go %100 and get stuck there for a long time, attempting to remove the track simple caused the app to become unresponsive. So I gave up on this editor at this point, and tried out ShotCut.

ShotCut Wins

ShotCut has this ability to blur a section of the screen, but since I was just starting out with video editing, I decided to take the lazy approach and use the scale and rotate filter, to raise the video of the certificate above the area of the product key. I did this using the cut option when i started to show the disc up close, and cut it again when I checked out the back of the jewel case.

ShotCut was really nice and informed me that my video was of a variable bit-rate which would be difficult to work with and ask to convert it to fixed (so must have built in transcoder, maybe Handbrake? built it to handle that) which I found was really nice and it would tell you how far along the process was, the CPU did go to 100% at this point however I had a progress bar, and it didn’t take all that long. Next thing you know I was editing and making clips together.

Then I used the same cut options to create a start cut area, and a stop cut area to cut out areas where I would end up yammering on about nothing, and speed them up.. saved everyone a bunch of time… this doesn’t provide privacy of what I actually said, if someone managed to playback the sound really slow, they would be able to figure out what I said. It was more for seeing how the track gets shortened, and have to butt up the other ends of the spliced tracks. I didn’t provide a video link here, as all it took was cutting areas of the track and then checking that sliced areas properties (highlight the sliced area, make sure you have the properties window available (enable it under the view tab option) you should see the sections “speed”)

Then I learned how to do a voice over. 😀 This along with a volume filter, finished of the video nicely. Again this was a very basic touch of ShotCut and I hope to use it more. It seemed realllllly good and less buggy then OpenShot.

I like them both as they are both open source, but the fact one of them caused CPU run away and couldn’t even play the project video at this time, and crashed when you would remove the item form the track, without any indoctrination what it was doing, was just a sure “I can’t use this app” sign for me. I hope it does well or at least maybe some other open source devs maybe pitch in their time to help it out, but I’d personally stick with ShotCut (Also they just recently supported keyframes, sooo yeeee!) Use it! 😀

I’ll quickly mention here that others have also mentioned Davinci Resolve 15, which runs under a free License, but is closed source. I have heard great things about this app, but closed source is just not for me unless it’s business derived software for a business purposes and is backed and funded by the big business boy’s. (I personally love GitHubs new model under Microsoft) So this app just leaves me wondering, how are they making their money?

If you are OK with possible personal data being sold (with Facebook and Google, not sure it really makes any difference really) then I’d probably give that software a shot too. I’ll stick with FOSS for now. 😀

Sorry this post got longer than I had expected. But I hope someone finds it educational. 🙂