Encoding h264 with meGUI

This tutorial will show you how to encode your video to h264 with meGUI.

Continuum - Winner of the TF2 movie competition!

Now that the voting has finished for the TF2 movie competition we have found the winner and it is SonofDad with his entry, Coninuum!

TF2 Movie Contest Entries and Voting

As most of you know, the voting for the best TF2 entry in the movie competition has started. You can vote on either the front page or here. The entries can be found in this blog post. Keep in mind that the poll closes on the 22nd of November, so remember to vote before that!

Submission deadline for TF2 movie contest this Saturday.

I would like to remind everyone that you have to submit your movie for the Team Fortress 2 movie competition by the 31st of October 2009 at 23:59 (GMT). We've received many awesome contest entries already. You can find the entries here.

Small updates, bug fixes and movie contest information

Firstly, we'd like to apologize for the minor bug related to the demo submissions for the contest. Even though we stated that demo submission was over, users were still capable of uploading demos to the contest. This bug should be fixed now however, but we'd like to make sure all editors are on the same page regarding the use of demos submitted past the deadline.

You are allowed to use the demos submitted past the deadline, as this was an error on our part.

Users might have been experiencing slow speeds the past week, as we were transferring and integrating a 4th content server to our network. With this addition, the streaming and download speeds should be fast for some time now. With the additional hardware at our disposal, we are planning on introducing low quality alternatives for streaming.

TF2 movie contest demos available for download

The demos can now be downloaded from the demos page found here.

Team Fortress 2 Skyboxes

wo0t wrote a tutorial on how to do sky replacements in Team Fortress 2, as seen in the Loaded frag video.

Here's a quick tutorial describing how to replace the Well skybox.

Team Fortress 2 movie contest

We are proud to announce our first movie making competition and the first Team Fortress 2 movie making contest. The aim of this contest is to promote Team Fortress 2 in general, and try and increase the editing involved in Team Fortress 2 frag movies in general.

For full details, please visit our contest page.

Introducing projects and demo library

In preperation for the Team Fortress 2 movie contest we will shortly be announcing, we have built a platform for movie makers to list their work in progress. With the use of the project listing, producers can gather demos from users, or browse through the public demo library. Users can follow the progress of projects, post comments, view screenshots and read updates regarding them. Get started by creating a new producer group and add your project. Users can post their demos for all movie makers to use here and if they wish to submit for a specific project, they can follow the submit link below the project.

Generating depth of field in After Effects for Team Fortress 2 footage

This tutorial will show you how to use the z-depth footage attained from using in-game command "r_depthoverlay 1" in After Effects to generate depth of field with the Lens Blur effect.

Watch the tutorial here.

Introducing producer profiles

We are proud to introduce our new producer profiles (sample)! Now you can find your favorite movies based on the creators, or to learn more about the creators behind a movie. Movie makers now have the possibility to form their own movie groups or join existing ones. Please note that a lot of movie groups exist already, and if you are part of the group please apply to join and claim ownership of the group (all requests will be moderated). Get started and form your own movie group now, as we will shortly be opening our demo archive for movie makers to use to find content for their movies, as well as the upcoming Team Fortress 2 movie contest!

Updated video player and fixed poll

We've added a volume adjuster to the video player as requested by our users. We also fixed some minor bugs within the player which some users were experiencing. We also managed to finally fix our poll on the front page, so get voting!

PldX looking for movie moderators

We are looking for eager gaming movie enthusiasts to join our staff. Our goal is to provide the community with gaming related movies from a variety of games. As a movie moderator your responsibilities include uploading new movies from your community and providing the required details for them, as well as approving movies submitted by other users. No technical skills required, but basic image editing as well as English preferred.

Movie moderator spots currently available:

• Team Fortress 2 - NZ/OZ communities


• Team Fortress 2 - North America


• Team Fortress 2 - Europe


• Counter-strike: Source - World wide


• Counter-strike - World wide


• Call of Duty 4 - World wide


• Quake Live and Quake 3 - World wide


• Spots for other games available as well, feel free to contact us for more details.

All interested users should contact us and provide some information regarding yourself, and which parts you would be interested in covering, and whether you have worked on similar projects earlier.

Small downtime due to network outage

We experienced a short downtime tonight due to a network outage at our main ISP.

The root cause of the problem was a failed 4x10GE blade on one of our core routers. When the traffic failed over to the other core router it has crashed the router thus causing complete network outage.

The issue has been resolved and the network should be back to normal now.

Disco Inferno - 3DS MAX generated TF2 movie

A while ago I created the TF2 machinima movie Engination, the purpose of the movie at first was to create an Engineer frag/machinima movie, but it turned out to be only machinima. During the later stages of the project, I got into some 3D work and learnt that the Team Fortress 2 models could be imported to 3DS Max. However, I only ended up doing a minor part for the credits with 3DS Max, but saw the potential it had. Watch the movie here.

Improved blog, recent updates and changes

We introduced a new blog recently which we will hopefully be keeping more updated than our old announcements forum. We migrated our articles and tutorials to this section of the website as well, and will be adding more tutorials shortly (if you have any requests for tutorials, feel free to post them in the comments!).

We recently implemented remote file hosting for downloads as well. We never really explained the reasons and what exactly we are doing. Our aim was always to provide a service for people to stream HD gaming movies. Arguably though, not everyone has a fast enough connection or powerful enough PC to be able to stream these movies without issues. Some might prefer to have a copy of the movie on their HDD as well, which is why we have always and will always be providing downloads for the movies as well. We however do not want to compromise the level of service we provide on the streams due to the downloads. The downloads are often upto 5x larger than our streams in filesize due to bad encoding by the creators etc. As a result, they use far more bandwidth than the streams. This isn't a problem if the traffic on the website is low enough for us to handle the bandwidth necessary, but during peak times this will result into problems.

A while ago we came to realize already that older movies were very hard to find available for download anymore. Most of the old download links were dead, and only low quality streams were available. We do not want this to happen for movies hosted on PldX. Regardless of whether we mirror the movies to 3rd party services, we will keep the originals on our server in case those mirrors stop hosting the files, in which case we can continue providing the downloads or provide it for download through another 3rd party service. This shouldn't result in much difference to our visitors except slightly longer download times, but our other options would have been to disable downloads completely, or only provide downloads of our streams (not the originals), or limit the bandwidth available for downloads to a minimum (which definetly should be slower than the 3rd party services provide for free members). We would also like to point out that we do not mirror all of our downloads to these 3rd party services, so we will continue to provide the downloads ourself for some of the movies.

Earlier this month we suffered from some down time due to a hardware failure at our primary server provider. Unfortunately the ISP wasn't capable of fixing the issue in a timely manner, which resulted in far longer downtime than it would have been necessary. Most importantly though, we managed to get the backups working with little work (even though the hardware failure was a failed HDD RAID). The very latest movies added to the site had to  be re-added, but all the movies prior to the downtime were shortly back up again. What we realized during the downtime as well is that we needed some other ways to inform the community what was going on if we suffered from similar downtime again. As a result, we formed a twitter page which we will keep up-to date if similar downtime occures again. Meanwhile, we'll be using it to inform of new movies, and other site related updates.

We are working on a number of new features and improvements as well. We are aware the current video player does not have volume control, but will be implementing one soon.

Importing Half-Life 2 models to 3DS Max

Whether you want to create your own models to use in-game or wish to make animations using the in-game models, it will become essential to import the models from the game into 3DS Max. To accomplish this, you'll need a number of programs and plugins:

Compiling images to video in Virtual Dub

Virtual Dub is a very useful program, which is also free. With this program you can compile recorded images from games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Source to video files.

Team Fortress 2 movie recording guide

This guide will explain how to record your demos to video files in Team Fortress 2 with perfect quality. All you need is a few files to make the process a lot easier (movie config and hud files). All these files are included in one zip archieve.

Encoding h264 with ffmpeg

ffmpeg is a widely used video encoding tool and is also used in many video encoding programs. This tutorial will show you how to encode your movies with ffmpeg to h264. This is one of the best video compressions out right now and we at pldx.com highly recommend using this for your movies, because it will keep the movie quality high and file size small.

What's been keeping us busy?

Besides adding hundreds of movies in the past few weeks, we have been working on a number of new features.

• Player Search - You can now search movies by the players featured in them (example)


• Music Search - Check what music is used most commonly and find movies through artists and songs


• New video player - The video player has been updated, which should fix a lot of streaming fps issues, the bad quality on videos while not watching them in full screen, and the support for seeking.


• Support for mirror selection - Users now have an option to select between our US and UK servers for both streaming and downloads.


• Screenshots - All movies now have screenshots available for them as well.


• Better performance - We've optimized a lot of the pages with caching which should result in a lot faster loading and browsing.


• Website Search - We've improved our website search along with the new features we've implemented


• Improved rating system - It just is a lot easier now.

We have a lot of other new features coming shortly as well as some new movie categories as well as shows!

Lot of small updates

We have been busy lately adding a lot of new movies, but also working on improving the site and adding additional functionality. All of our channels now are available as RSS feeds. You can find the links below each of the channels. We've also introduced some more indepth statistics to movies, where you can now see more in detail who is linking to the movies and which days the movie has been viewed a lot. Finally, I'd like to mention that we have opened up an IRC channel on Quakenet with the name #pldx so please drop by and say Hi, or check out our recently opened Steam Community Group.