Prefer videohelp myself...for video related problems... Far better organisation of subjects, easier to find the information you need... and members who know how to use the search and READ the results before posting the same question time and time and time again... my $0.02
Maybe because there are things like xbox problems and linux issues I can help with.. instead of being boring and posting lots and lots of technical stuff about the undocumented features of ffmpeg, and how to patch it to do off the wall things such as reversing the audio and video streams in an M4S2 file..? heh heh heh
both sites serve the needs of the people who go to the sites, there are great things on both of the sites!
aD is more n00b friendly.. especially with it's primary function.. video and dvd items. usually people will at least get a link to a guide relevant to the issue.. Videohelp is a lot more "RTFM and post a basic beginners question without reading again if you dare".. :lol: Different sites, different mission statements. I belong to both, but my work at videohelp is radically different to here, where TBH it would go straight over the heads of the average joe.. That's the kind of stuff that gets reserved for videohelp
AD needs a newbie form. There are just too many posts in the popular forums by people asking question that don't even know enough to provide the information necessary for people to answer it. I've seen some threads, perhaps 8 - 10 posts, that had yet to establish what the issue is, because of the reason above. A newbie forum would help, and gather these kinds of "problems" together. Just my 2c.
that is why we have something called rules, if the newbies were to read theese, there should be no problems, and there will be some who will not be able to understand no matter what way you put the help! also the guide section covers allmost anything.
You don't think a newbie forum would help? Then maybe the newbies would assist each other and pick up a thing or two. The regular use forums would be better. They would have a higher percentage of useful posts, questions and answers with some value to readers. We were all newbies once, it's just a stage you go through, there's nothing condescending about it - but hopefully we learn eventually. It's one of the problems with these all-in-one software types that are popular now. It's a black box and you don't learn anything. Now you feed in an avi or an flv, and out the other end comes an ISO of all things. Which you're supposed to write to a dvd, and Hey Presto! play it your dvd player. But what if it doesn't doesn't play? You never saw, or even knew about the intermediate mpeg 2 files, so you can't test them to see if they play in VLC or WMP - in short you're completely lost and you never learned anything. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. And to top it off, they think the ISO is a video file and they want to know how to "play" it. (Edited for readability)
This same thing happens with all technology -- at first, the stuff is so darn difficult, but if there's enough interest, the guides for it will pop up and even Joe Averages are willing to learn it (or to follow a guide through step by step . Then, somebody eases the process by developing a one-click tool for getting rid of couple of extra steps in the process. Then next guy develops even better one-click tool that takes care of the whole process -- and if the quality and ease-of-use are "good enough", the majority of people will simply stop using the difficult-but-high-quality tools and guides. We've seen it happen several times during the history of our site -- nine years in this business is a long time We started out as a site mostly focused on MP3s... Then, quite rapidly, ripping CDs into good quality MP3s became so damn easy that people didn't want to discuss about stuff like how to get the best possible audio quality out of compressed audio. Then, next big thing was ripping DVDs to VideoCDs. That required originally 5 - 10 different tools and about 8-10 hours of time to rip one DVD. Then it got easier and easier.. Actually before the VCDs managed to become "too easy for guides", DivX and SVCD had already taken its place. And with DivX, same thing .. you needed to rip the DVD, then use stuff like DVD2AVI, VFAPI, VirtualDub, etc. And not too long, we had tools like GKnot, DVD2SVCD, etc that made the whole process so easy that guides and detailed info for those topics became almost obsolete. Then DVD -> DVDR was next step, at first, it required manual editing of IFOs, etc and helluva lot of tweaking. Along came DVD Shrink & co and nobody cared how to optimize the process for high quality anymore Currently, the guys who truly love this shit, are building the best methods for making AVC-encoded DVDR discs out of original Blu-ray discs that'll play on Blu-ray players. The process will be at first a painful at best.. But within next 12 months, I'm sure we'll see tools called "Blu-ray2DVD" and "ManyDVDMovies2BDR" etc But hey, that's progress. There'll be always a certain handful of people who prefer to do things "right" rather than "easy" -- that's why sites like hydrogenaudio, d9 and others have their loyal following and I congratulate them for having that spirit there. Videohelp, in my mind at least, is somewhere in between d9 and AfterDawn in terms of "hard core enthusiasts".. They lack the developers that make d9 so damn unique in some sense, but they still do have guys who "know their stuff" -- and, again, my opinion, sometimes slightly overlook newbies. We... We're maybe positioned somewhere between "hard core" and "newbie friendly".. or have both of them. Dunno. We have guys here who truly, TRULY know their stuff. But we've probably also managed to make the athmosphere here somewhat slightly more n00b friendly (despite having twice-a-year appearing heated debates over the topic how "AfterDawn and its senior members are hostile against new users") than other major video tech sites. Hard to say, as I don't unfortunately frequent forums as often as I used to and I am sometimes very "lost" on what is the general mood in our discussion forums at the time. But anyway, the topic of this thread is useless You can't compare and you shouldn't. I've always congratulated us and our "competitors" in this "scene" for being able to co-exist for almost a decade now and never, ever having to end up fighting online or throwing silly 15-yr-old -style shit at each others. DDigest, Doom9, Videohelp and us have somehow, dunno really how, managed to each get our own corner of this "digital video" business. Sure, several newcomers have appeared over the years and some of them might even be bigger than some of us "original four", as I don't follow the "scene" too much nowadays. But still. Almost a Decade.. All covering pretty much the same aspects of the same niche market (just everybody from their own angle) and still managing to keep it civil Damn. Australian / Austrian / Swedish / Finnish peace treaty or something, dunno But ye. Don't compare, use all of them.
dRD, excellent points. Thanks for taking the time to communicate it. As you point out, we're not all nerds, some just not interested in learning all the theory. That's OK. I never noticed the dvd-r for newbies, but I'll take a look. Cheers, Dave
