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.