Hi, I’m new here. I’ve been browsing the forum for the past two days, since I heard Nate mention it in his podcast, and I’m really digging it. Looks like I’m going to spend quite a bit of time here.
For starters, I’d like to mention pinballvideos.com, a pinball video search website I made a few months ago. I’ve been documenting the progress over at pinside, but maybe some of you missed it, so here it is again. In a nutshell: you can search for player names, machines, or tournaments, and the results will link you to the exact game you’re looking for (i.e. to the specific game start time within those hours long tournament videos), with some statistical data on the players involved as a bonus. I think it turned out pretty neat, and I’ve been using it quite a bit myself for tournament research.
Any feedback appreciated. This seems to be a players’ forum, which is very cool, so it’s all the more interesting to me to hear your opinions on it and any suggestions on how it might be improved.
All the videos from the PAPA channel should be in there, but there’s some cool stuff from other channels, too. I’m not making any money off it, I just did it for my own benefit and couldn’t find a compelling reason not to share.
Love the site and have been watching a lot of vids through it. Especially love that you can search by player. What a great way of organizing. One thing I’d like to see is a way to alleviate some of the scrolling necessary to browse the videos. Perhaps a expand/collapse of the game title or a way of breaking down the listing into smaller pieces.
I’ve been using the site quite a bit and I think it’s fantastic. It’s not only a good implementation, but something that was sorely needed for competitive pinball players. The PAPA site is good of course, but finding a specific machine that hasn’t had a specific tutorial done on it is very difficult. This site solves that problem.
Well done. The only point I could mention that could be improved is the feedback area. I’ve tried to submit feedback (indicating that the video I watched was what I was after), but it doesn’t seem to ever work. I’m not sure that’s a critical element to the experience anyway but thought I’d mention it.
I noticed this to. Going back a page after you watch a video, scrolls back to the top of the first page. Would be great if it went back to where you clicked on the link.
How bout a submission link? In case someone finds a video or uploads their own? Great job on your site btw!
I don’t have any immediate feedback for it, but I’ve definitely made some use of it!
Is it manually maintained or somehow all automated? I can’t imagine how long it must’ve taken to find timecodes in videos for all the different machines.
I’ve been to the site a few times too, and really enjoy it myself. I know at one point I tried to leave the awesome feedback a few months ago and it didn’t seem like it worked. Could’ve been a fluke, though.
The biggest suggestion I have for you is being able to single out highlights. It’s cool seeing individual games being played, but sometimes something so spectacular happens it’s worth pointing out just that one thing. My favorite example of this is the following:
I was watching this live and couldn’t help but get a big smile on my face when it dawned on Bowen what was about to go down. This is Keith Elwin getting the ultimate setup on DH, 450M+ left ramps. (Only) 40M supers + 50M rank maxed bonus * 5 for every shot. He misses shot one but makes 2 more shots, and you can see when he drains he actually had 11 more seconds of 5x scoring to go. I documented this years ago on rgp in the mid 90s to amazingly little fanfare. To see it actually done on camera was a sight to behold.
Anyway, I’m sure there are lots of other moments that would be awesome to single out. People like seeing wicked shimmys, for example. A highlight section that you could even then parlay into a highlight reel if someone was feeling particularly edit-y would be awesome.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I’m going to address them in a single reply:
Lost scroll position after going back from a video: I didn’t notice this, because I’m mainly using Chrome, and it restores the scroll position by itself. Definitely an issue, and I’ll see what I can do about it. In the meantime, there’s the workaround of opening the video in a new tab.
Issues with the Feedback area: Thanks for pointing this out. There was a bug with cache invalidation, which made it seem like nothing’s happening, but it’s fixed now, and all the ratings have been applied. I just realized, though, that the UI is less than ideal, in that people might not hit the submit button, thinking that clicking a radio would immediately send the rating. Definitely needs some tinkering.
Yes, it’s all manually maintained. There’s just no way to automate the timestamping, but since I’m watching the videos anyway, it’s not really a bother.
I like the idea of singling out interesting moments. It’s a good fit, since the whole site is basically about finding interesting stuff to watch.
Since there’s so much content in there now, and with the current rating system being very rudimentary, I was actually thinking about adding Highscores, so it’s easier to see what might be an interesting watch, but that would be a lot of work, and user submitted highlights would probably work even better for making the good stuff easier to find.
Like, pause the video at a point where something cool is happening, write a short note about what that cool thing is, and submit. The video now has that highlight attached to it and will gain visibility. I can definitely see this working.
I’ve actually been taking some notes on interesting moments and their video start times, like huge balls, and stuff like tilting a game with a tilt cam installed, Shatz shatzing the outlane, or Adam Lefkoff getting that absurd over the flipper lazarus, so I’ve already got some material to get this started, once I’ve implemented it. Cool idea, I’ll try to get this working as soon as possible.
I’ve just added a bunch of tutorial videos from the Buffalo Pinball channel, and with more tutorial sources being included, I feel the way they are being presented on my website isn’t as good as it should be. There’s a wide variation in how tutorials are being done by different people, and the listing is pretty simplistic.
That said, for the moment I’d like to at least include player names for all the tutorials, so there’s at least some clue on the tutorial type, but I’m still missing player info on the pinball 101 tutorials. Is this Keith Elwin playing in all of those?
Just wanted to point you towards some more channels of content. I’m producing pinball videos for these channels and while they currently only contain one or two useful clips for now, I have more unedited materials in the pipeline. And I constantly think about how I can shoot more tournaments. Usually we have tournament formats in Sweden that have a bit too many games for me to be able to shoot qualifications and finals without having way too many camera rigs, so usually I’m only able to shoot final round of finals by moving camera rig from game to game.
Anyway, here are the links.
Flipper-SM (Videos from Swedish National Championships)
bitwalk.tv (Videos from my own yearly swedish tournament ABCP, might be videos from other Swedish tournaments in the future as well)
I noted them down, but I’m going to hold off on including them for the moment, because I need to do some UI overhaul first, so commentary language will be indicated in the list view. The subtitles are nice, but they only cover the intro and not the actual gameplay.
I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate all the work you’ve done on this. I use your website all the time to research tables I’m going to play in upcoming tournaments. Thank you!
I’ve really been getting into the Dead Flip videos lately. They are entertaining players and really go in-depth on the game rules. Might be worth including them in this site?
Thanks for the link. I’ve browsed around a bit, and it’s definitely entertaining, but I’m not really sure what to do with it at the moment. Apart from tournament footage, I’ve only been including more or less concise tutorial-type videos so far. I’ve added the channel to my growing list of videos I might use in the future, though.
To see it actually done on camera was a sight to behold.
