Bullet Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullet Time

#11

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

dugditches wrote: post #4

Youtube used to have something similar with annotations. You'd get videos spammed with them covering the screen. But some uploaders used them to make something akin to DVD menus. Being able to skip to other videos or timestamps in a longer video. Looks like Youtube removed it this year. Pity since it also served as a way to 'edit' or correct videos. Instead of putting it in the Description/Comments hoping to be read.

The way YouTube annotations were used could tell you a lot about the character of people whose videos you were watching. On average, not many good things. Overall, getting rid of them made the YouTube experience significantly better, though as you say, losing corrections was an unfortunate collateral damage. They should've just auto-appended them to video descriptions with timestamps on them - the way many music compilations have a list of constituent songs with clickable timestamps.

Unfortunately, after removing annotations, YouTube added a really obnoxious popup with recommended videos that shows up whenever you pause the video, obscuring a good 1/3 of it. It's like they really want people to hate them.

Re: Bullet Time

#12

Post by taneq » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 5:26 AM UTC

needle0 wrote: post #10

taneq wrote: post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Trust me, the difference between the comments vertically scrolling in the sidebar and horizontally on top of the video is huge. In Twitch, when the comments become fast enough they literally give no time for the viewer to parse and understand most of them; With bullet comments plus Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio (or at least with my experience with Japanese on Niconico), each of the comments h…

So the increased density of languages like Japanese actually translates to faster reading comprehension? I guess I'd always assumed that concepts-per-second would be about the same even if one language took up more physical space per concept than another.

Re: Bullet Time

#13

Post by bscphil » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

It's also common for Twitch streamers to upload their videos to Youtube, and overlay the Twitch comments onto the video. This can have the same sort of subjective impression as the bullet comments described here, although it's less interactive (since there's less emphasis on non-live comments).

Re: Bullet Time

#14

Post by lifthrasiir » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 8:15 AM UTC

needle0 wrote: post #10

taneq wrote: post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Trust me, the difference between the comments vertically scrolling in the sidebar and horizontally on top of the video is huge. In Twitch, when the comments become fast enough they literally give no time for the viewer to parse and understand most of them; With bullet comments plus Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio (or at least with my experience with Japanese on Niconico), each of the comments h…

One complicated reason why horizontally scrolling comments are not more widespread is a patent.

Dwango has two related patents (Japanese patents no. 4695583 & 4734471), so competitors had to work around them; most prominently, FC2's Himawari Douga was able to escape the trap by moving an input form inside the video (something Dwango was unable to secure due to prior arts) [1]. But this was hard win, and probably it is much safer to avoid horizontally scrolling comments at all. I'm aware of several Korean and Japanese video websites that have rejected this system exactly due to patent concerns.

Interestingly though, Bilibili and many other Chinese video websites do use the very same comment system as Niconico! More amusingly it is legal because Dwango's patents are dated on December 2006 and that was before the Chinese Patent Law has amended on 2008 to much broadly acknowledge foreign patents [2]. As a result they are free to use the system without a patent issue [3], and it is probably partly why they got popular in China.

[1] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/byline/kuriharakiyoshi/20180926-000...

[2] https://www.ipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/DragonGetsNew...

[3] http://www.acgn-globalbiz.com/entry/2019/01/06/%E5%8B%95%E7%...

Re: Bullet Time

#15

Post by iforgotpassword » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:21 AM UTC

gfody wrote: post #5

this feels so dystopian to me. not only can the media be engineered to push whatever agenda but so can the perceived social reaction to it - like the mind control machine choking up its grip. of course it happens in China first

[flagged]

Re: Bullet Time

#16

Post by iforgotpassword » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

> In fact, many of them actually have Bilibili’s exact bullet comment feature, which was open-sourced by the company in 2015.

I'm curious how much stuff we're missing out on because it doesn't appear on our radar. It has happened a handful of times so far that I googled something and ended up on a github repo that had a Chinese readme only. Only from context I could guess what it was about. And I wouldn't even be surprised if bilibili had an English readme for their stuff.

Re: Bullet Time

#17

Post by instakill » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

Already mentioned in this thread is the fact that for videos with high frequency comments, reading vertically scrolling text becomes impossible because they scroll too fast.

Would would be cool if video platforms allowed Reddit-style voting for 3 or 4 comments per 10/15/20 second segments that would display as bubbled up (with viewers being able to expand for more comments for the same time slot).

That would solve the issue of comment-spam overwhelming the videos, plus it would become an incentive for higher quality submissions.

Re: Bullet Time

#18

Post by luckylion » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 10:09 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #7

gfody wrote: post #5

this feels so dystopian to me. not only can the media be engineered to push whatever agenda but so can the perceived social reaction to it - like the mind control machine choking up its grip. of course it happens in China first

This comes from Nico Nico (some Japanese video site) and is basically like a live stream chat but overlaid on the video. There’s definitely some argument about groupthink but you don’t need coordinated state propoganda for that, people end up doing that anyways

When the result of the groupthink is centrally controlled, it opens up a big avenue for manipulation, though. I mean, it's not that different from traditional media telling you "what people think", but probably feels more real because it's interactive.

Re: Bullet Time

#19

Post by francislavoie » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

instakill wrote: post #17

Already mentioned in this thread is the fact that for videos with high frequency comments, reading vertically scrolling text becomes impossible because they scroll too fast. Would would be cool if video platforms allowed Reddit-style voting for 3 or 4 comments per 10/15/20 second segments that would display as bubbled up (with viewers being able to expand for more comments for the same time slot). That would solve th…

Since Twitch uses IRC under the hood, it would probably take a full rewrite to support that kind of thing. I agree though, I'd love an alternative way to keep some comments sticky.

YouTube live chat does have a couple features to aid with that, they have "super chats" which are basically a way to pay to get your comment to stick at the top of the chat box, and they have a filter to just show top comments instead of the full live feed. It helps somewhat, but obviously it's not a complete solution.

Re: Bullet Time

#20

Post by runj__ » Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 11:23 AM UTC

needle0 wrote: post #10

taneq wrote: post #3

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Trust me, the difference between the comments vertically scrolling in the sidebar and horizontally on top of the video is huge. In Twitch, when the comments become fast enough they literally give no time for the viewer to parse and understand most of them; With bullet comments plus Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio (or at least with my experience with Japanese on Niconico), each of the comments h…

> Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio [...], each of the comments horizontally scrolling on top of the video leave just enough mental processing time to read through the majority of them

This is what emotes are for, no? Most of the comments in a traditional Forsen stream are emotes and I'd argue that they give you a pretty good idea of the atmosphere of the chat.