Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been released on December 7th 2018 and boy it’s good. The last game I’ve played was the 3DS version, it was fine and ran pretty nicely for the hardware.
I’ve purchased the collector edition with the GameCube gamepad and the adapter.
The game
As announced the character list is massive with over 70 characters in the base game and only the original roster unlocked on a fresh save, there are many characters to unlock and to fight with and against.
The menu is what you would expect since Brawl, you’ve got the main modes which are classic and versus, and you’ve got the adventure mode, World of Light.
Versus and classic are basically the same, with classic replacing bosses depending on the character you are playing.
World of light is the new adventure mode where you will be able to literally go on an adventure, more to follow below.
“Will it hurt?”
Performance
With the lowspec hardware of the Switch, one would expect that great engineering went into optimizing the game. It feels as smooth as it gets and look very nice while not dropping enough frames to notice.
There doesn’t seem to be more input lag than on the previous entries from what I’m used to with the GameCube controller.
Victory!
Controls
Being used to the feeling of the XBox 360 gamepad and the Joycons, I’ve rediscovered the Gamecube controller and have battled with it a bit. The good thing about the controls is that they are the same since melee, the bad thing is that we need the adapter which requires being in docked mode or a hub.
Adventure: World of Light
The trailer does a pretty good job showcasing the adventure. You start with only Kirby and you’ll smash your way through to awaken your allies in the quest to take down Galeem.
The adventure lasts at least 20 hours and has a couple of different challenge based around fighting. This isn’t the adventure of Melee.
When you win a fight you will earn a spirit that can be used to set certain skills on your fighter and buff his attack and defense.
Online versus
As experienced with Super Smash Bros 3DS the online experience will be different for everyone and against everyone. You can feel even the slightest lag and the game doesn’t seems to have proper matchmaking at the time of writing.
The experience can be really bad if you are stuck in a fight that is lagging so much that in game time is slower than real world time. No one wants to have a minute extented to 5.
As an example here are two fights that provide two different experiences. The first fight is a laggy fight, not really fun but it gives you time to see what you did wrong.
The second fight is what you should expect, performance wise, of a good and faire fight.
On the bright side of things you can have pretty good fights when everything goes well.
Conclusion
This game is fun. While I’m not very good I have enjoyed the adventure more than expected and I was surprised. The new characters feel really polished and I’ll be playing Ridley more seriously.
The changes to the already existing fighters are good, Link feels much more interesting to fight with his new bombs.
This is my follow up to getting started with FFmpeg. I strongly recommend getting to know the tool better in my previous post about it.
Concatenate
Multiple clips can be merged together with the concat demuxer. The idea is to create a text file with a list of files to concatenate together (in order), the format is as follows:
# List of files in order
file './file1.mp4'
file './file2.mp4'
file './file3.mp4'
For the lazy people like me it’s possible to use shell scripting to generate this list:
for f in ./*.mp4; do
echo "file '$f'" >> list.txt
done
Then you need to feed the file as an input and specify the format (-f) as concat:
ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt -c copy output.mp4
The wiki page speaks more in detail about this feature.
Extracting the frames
It is quite simple to extract all the frames from a video as pictures.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 frame_%03d.png
In this command we extract every frame from input.mp4 as PNG pictures. We use the printf format for the numbering of the frame (we pad with 0 the %d for 3 characters).
It’s possible to use the parameters for the start and length of the clip to extract part of the frames or just simply limit number of frames to extract with -vframes. We can also specify a different framerate to work with during this process with -vf fps=1.
Hardware acceleration encoding
For maximum speed it is possible to use a hardware encoder for H264, I will only cover how to do this with an NVidia GPU (NVENC).
First check that FFmpeg has not been configured with --disable-nvenc, this will appear in the banner when running FFmpeg if NVENC is disabled.
This looks exactly as encoding, except the codec on line 2 is different, it has _nvenc appended to it. This is really simple and will boost the encoding drastically.
Reading more
Please check out the following pages if you wish to know more:
Visual Studio Code is great customizable editor for Windows that is actually quite light compared to Visual Studio. It has support for multiple languages and SCM like Git.
But it has a major drawback, at least on Windows… It sets core.filemode to true in Git repositories. That’s bad because you might commit all the files that were not changed with the files that were changed because it sets the execution bit to true.
What is core.filemode?
Git tracks changes in files, even permissions. The setting core.filemode tells Git to track the file’s execution bit from its permissions. This can really mess up versioning.
Solution
You can either globally set core.filemode to false or set it on the current repository with the following command:
Just to be sure I prefer to set it everytime I create a repository and I’ll be using Visual Studio Code.
Update: 2021-02-27
It appears that the PowerShell might ignore the .gitconfig from my home folder too, I’d need to investigate that further to verify this but the short version is: on Windows core.filemode might be set to true by default, so check your repository settings.
It’s quite wide. The joycons are not the most comfortable and need some serious getting used to, especially on games such as Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate!
The pro controller is not cheap at all, but since I didn’t buy it (yet?) I can’t speak about its comfort. It looks much better for using it while the console is standing or docked.
The triggers are awkward to use, the sticks are not placed ideally. It’s looks like a hot mess at first and getting used to it is part of the learning curve, not that it’s a good thing.
I’m a trained soldier though!
Get a glass screen protector
The screen glass is low quality compared to the smartphone glass, it will keep your fingerprint like the police just arrested you. It might scratch really easily too, especially if the dock is used a lot.
Any tempered glass screen protector should improve the screen durability, the biggest challenge will be placing it correctly with no dust or air bubbles. I have yet to master this skill.
No memory card included
As expected there’s no micro SD card included, I’d recommend getting at least a 32GB if you plan to screenshot a lot and purchase games from the eShop. Just to list storage requirements for a couple of games:
Super Smash Bros Ultimate: 14.7GB;
Zelda: Breath of the Wild: 14.5GB;
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: 14GB + 4.5GB (DLC);
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: 12GB;
Mario Odyssey: 5.6GB;
Stardew Valley: 1GB.
No one is safe from storage heavy games anymore.
The Nintendo eShop
The eShop should learn from other stores. There’s no way to get easily a list of free games or demo without resorting to the search features and ordering by price.
Sometimes by going back through the prompt instead of pressing B will throw you back to the eShop home, not what I though would happen when I started downloading a couple of demos.
Album
When saving screenshots and short clips of 30 seconds they are sent to the album which is the screenshot folder where nothing seems to be sorted. The only way to transfer these files is by ejecting the micro SD card, which is a fine option.
But there’s no way to upload videos to YouTube!
It’s possible to only share screenshots and videos through Twitter and Facebook, or you could buy a card reader and turn off the console then dump the micro SD card’s media onto your computer.
Not every screen can be screenshot and the output format is always JPEG, not the best quality.
Regrets
The red joycon doesn’t look red like on the pictures. It’s closer to a neon red than a bright red color. I’m nit-picking because I really like red. The controls are not as comfortable when getting started too, it’s like there’s a break in period for your hands.
Accessing the other region stores, like the Japanese one for Phantasy Star Online 2 Cloud (to get the Breath of the Wild items), requires adding another user. If you keep that user on the Switch you will be asked to select a user to launch at game… I’d prefer a default user in this case.
There’s no option to upload videos to YouTube as of right now.
Conclusion
As I have not had the opportunity to play a game online I can’t comment it just yet, same goes for cloud saves and any of the advertised features of the subscription. I just really hope that the sales won’t be lock behind the subscription since I don’t plan on paying until I get a game that can be played online (like Smash).
I’ve bought Super Mario Odyssey with the console and got Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu when it came out, for now I feel satisfied since they are both great games and the upcoming line up is great.
No matter how old I get I still love these games. Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee are the latest games of the Pokémon series. Everybody knows about Pokémon, it’s like the Coca Cola of the gaming industry, but healthier.
You will walk 10Km to hatch that egg!
The screenshots and video recording are all done through the Switch’s feature, thus we are working with low bitrate video capped at 30 second, low quality JPEG screenshots. PNG lives matter!
Mainline game or spinoff?
This game is like the 12th time we had the opportunity to visit Kanto but it doesn’t get all that old. The game is solid and definitely is a mainline game. It plays the story like Yellow with come additions.
It’s not even my first time
Capture
The capture mechanic is the same as Pokemon GO at the exception of the way you throw the Poké Ball. You feel like you have less control than on the mobile game and it doesn’t always feel rewarding because you don’t battle Pokémons to catch them.
The wild Pokémons roam the world, no more random encounters unless they spawn on you. You get what you see.
In handheld mode you just press a button, but it seems you can aim the view with the gyroscopic features of the Switch. In detached mode and Poké Ball Plus you swing to send a Poké Ball.
Of course if there’s no battle mechanic that means that you can make wild Pokémons sleep and make catching them easier and that’s really a shame.
This is the core mechanic from the series.
It’s simple
Starting with generation 2 we were able to make our Pokémons hold items, this is missing. Since forever we had PC boxes to store Pokémons, this has been replaced by the bag.
This game seems to start on something new with Combat Points showing a value that represents all the stats of a Pokemon.
Poké Ball Plus
The Poké Ball Plus contains mew. It’s a 50€ piece of DLC and game controller. As a DLC is easy to use, just get the mystery gift inside it and you are done. As a game controller it’s not the best at all… It tends to rotate in the hand and some menus can’t be access since there are only two buttons.
While it’s possible to shake it to trigger a “third button” you can’t get more details on your moves during combat with it.
Against wild Pokémons you can swing it to throw a Poké Ball, just like with the detached joycon.
It also has more features, you can place a Pokémon on it and use the pedometer to gain more experience and some reward for walking around. When it’s linked to Pokémon GO you can have it vibrate when it spots Pokémons… Depending on your location it won’t stop vibrating.
I took Pikachu on a stroll and played some Pokémon GO
What’s missing?
So much is missing… First of all there are much less tactile interactions. You can pat Pikachu with the touchscreen and that seems to be it. You can’t navigate the menus or send Poké Balls with the touchscreen.
The abilities from the 3rd generation are missing too. This is good to avoid some of the weird quirks you’d face when battling certain Pokémons (like heatproof).
The Global Trading System (GTS) doesn’t exist, that’s a shame because it helped completing the Pokédex. No Wonder Trade (WT) but it’s not a big deal for that.
Trading and all other online features are locked behind a subscription.
Not as expensive as the others, but do we need that?
Conclusion
The game is pretty well made, going back to Kanto feels good and the additions in the story are not bad. I regret not being able to battle wild Pokémons to make them easier to catch though.
The framerate of the game feels smooth enough, this was hard to achieve with Sun & Moon and is really nice to look at.
I hope that the next entries to the series will bring back fighting wild Pokémon.
The tool I use the most to clip videos and (re)encode media is FFmpeg, a command line bundle of utilities and libraries that is very powerful but not necessarily intuitive.
This is a small guide about the most useful commands.
Basic command line
The basic command is composed by an input and an output:
# Conserve the same format
ffmpeg -i "./input.mp4" "./output.mp4"
# Conserve the same exact encoding settings
ffmpeg -i "./input.mp4" -c copy "./output.mp4"
# Conserve only the sound
ffmpeg -i "./input.mp4" "./output.mp3"
In the command line we have the input parameter marked by the -i option. The output is positioned at the end of the command.
The -c argument correspond to video and audio codecs when followed by copy to conserve the same streams as they were encoded in the input.
Argument quirks
FFmpeg uses the position of the arguments, the input cannot be place elsewhere than at the start of the line and all options related to the input must be placed before the input file.
The output options can be place after the inputs.
Extracting a clip
Sometimes you are proud of the way you handled a boss in a game or you just want to clip out a part of a movie, to do that you will need to provide the start of the clip and sometimes the length of the clip you wish to extract.
We set the start of the clip with -ss and specifying a time code;
We set the input file;
We set the length of the clip;
We set the output.
The start and length are expressed as a time code:
Hours
Minutes
Secondes
Milliseconds
00
:
01
:
37
.
000
In our case we are working with minutes and seconds, but we can go as low a milliseconds. Keep in mind that if you do not re-encode you might end up with a couple of unwanted frames.
Encoding
More often than not encoding will be necessary if you want to publish online, reduce the file size or edit the media file. Here are a couple of snippets for different formats.
Implicitly convert
For the programmer lazy people like me it’s possible to quickly extract the sound or convert a video as a gif:
# Convert a video to an audio only file
ffmpeg \
-i "./input.mp4" \
"./output.mp3"
# Convert to a gif
ffmpeg \
-i "./input.mp4" \
"./output.gif"
This will use default settings, you can tweak the settings by going in-depth depending on the output format you choose (Encode/MP3).
Same codec, different bitrate
Changing the bitrate is possible, for a loss in quality.
# Convert to h264 with a bitrate of
ffmpeg \
-i "./input.mp4" \
"./output.mp4"
It’s also possible to run two passes by adding the parameter -pass with the argument 1 or 2 for the first and second pass.
# Convert to h264 with a bitrate of
ffmpeg -i "./input.mp4" -c:v libx264 -b:v 2600k -pass 1 -an -f mp4 /dev/null
ffmpeg -i "./input.mp4" -c:v libx264 -b:v 2600k -pass 2 -c:a aac -b:a 128k "./output.mp4"
As you see on line 2 we use the argument -an to not treat the audio but during the second pass we specify a codec with -c:a and the audio bitrate -b:a, this is because the first pass only treats the video stream.
If you wish you can add the audio the the first pass, nothing is stopping you from doing so.
We still supply the video codec for both passes with -c:v and the bitrate -b:v.
Please note that bitrates can also be expressed in other units such as M for megabits.
We also don’t output the video stream to a file on line 2 because we are having FFmpeg generate a log file for the second pass. We also need to specify the output format to the encode with -f so that the second pass is not lost.
You can read more on h264 encode on the FFmpeg wiki.
What about the WebM format? Well it’s a bit the same but with different codecs:
A new option on line 5 is the constant quality mode and this is the reason we have set the video bitrate to 0. Instead of imposing a fixed bitrate we will instead of have a variable bitrate used to target the quality we want.
It is possible to omit -crf and specify a video bitrate instead.
If you wish to target a lossless quality you can do so by setting the argument -lossless to 1.
VP9 does support two pass encoding and will work the same as h264.
Here we reduce the frame rate to 25 with the option -r. The resolution is lowered with option -vf scale= to 160 by 90. It’s possible to keep the aspect ratio by specifying -1 in the scaling such as scale=1280x-1 to scale down to 720p from 1080p (assuming the aspect ratio was 16:9).
Conclusion
FFmpeg is a great tool that can basically do anything when working with media files. It’s very popular and used everywhere because of how powerful it is.
I’ve heard about the Emoji picker you can spawn by hitting Win Key + ; or Win Key + . but I was never able to see it until I tweaked the registry. It looks good and does what it’s supposed to.
This guide is about Windows 10 and was tested on build 1709.
Into the registry
Like always you can open the registry by hitting Win Key + R, this doesn’t change much.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Input\Settings and create a DWORD value called EnableExpressiveInputShellHotkey and set it to 1.
Run: regedit.exe
Source
This post was written after finding the Windows Central page about it.
Linus Tech Tips is one of the channels I have the most followed out of my subscriptions over the years. I’ve been writing this post on and off since May 2017 and I have unsubscribed in April 2018.
I feel like this post is still relevant because it also shows what YouTube is becoming.
What I liked
I like the unboxing type videos that were going over hardware and benchmarks. The overclocking guides were nice and I always wished they would showcase some of the keyboard and mouse software that is actually part of the experience.
The content was genuine and didn’t seem all that forced (unlike pushing a Dyson sponsorship over a vlog).
There used to be something to get out of the content.
What I disliked
When doing review of keyboard and mice they always skipped the software that comes with it. It’s part of the experience too. They also don’t cover older hardware to see how it performs nowadays or make follow ups on gaming laptops…
Once the content is produced and uploaded they’re done, unless it’s a multi part video.
The silly faces do not make me feel like I’m a grown up too even though they were not as bad as the current ones.
Why I’m ending my subscription
It’s not what it was. It became pretty bad and that’s what happens when you expand. The clickbait is painful. The thumbnails are terrible. The video title could be randomly generated by and algorithm for all I care.
Toddlers made the thumbnails and wrote the titles
By looking at the thumbnails and the titles it’s really hard to know what it really is about:
Gaming with your FEET: what the name/brand of the device?
High School for GAMERS: where?
Hotel Built for Gamers – WHAT???: what and where again?
This Laptop Does EVERYTHING! Sorta.: which laptop?
Why is EVERYONE Buying the $200 Phone??: what phone?
The videos only aim to generate clicks, not content.
Name catching videos are necessary, right, everyone need to earn a living because food doesn’t grow on tables. But there are video titles that too far.
It sounds like a lie that a PC could be as thin as a coin. When I think of the thinness (or thickness) of a coin I don’t think about the diameter of one but about the actual side, edge or slice. When comparing thinness you take the thinnest part to compare to the other thinness part. The flat side of a coin isn’t the thinnest.
Triple your battery life by crippling your performance and experience! We could also desolder all the LEDs just in case and replace the electic fans with hand fan.
Already recommend while I just unsubscribed
In early 2021
This have not changed much…
It still won’t leave a good taste in my mouth…
The content doesn’t seem to be relevant to me.
Low Quality content
At first the quality was low. The idea was putting out new videos as quick as possible but we had informative content at least. That was during the NCIX time. Then LinusTechTips became a team and quality went up and the content was really good.
But now everything is going down the drain. Quality and informative content doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
The 3D keyboard might be more damaging than anything else. The quality of the video is so bad that it doesn’t even feel serious anymore. We don’t need to have actors fake fainting/falling. The old B-roll was actually better.
Nitpicking
I don’t need to hear the sound of a data center, you can afford to do voiceovers now, not that it’s expensive or hard to integrate over moving pictures. I’d prefer high quality B-roll instead of bad and unnecessary acting.
The videos are also clearly aimed at the North American audience and the rest of world, in wich there’s Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe, won’t be able to relate to the pricing or the imperial system. There’s no world besides America on YouTube most of the time I guess.
For the pricing excluding tax makes price seems so much cheaper, it’s deceptive but it’s not like they sell the hardware they review so… Whatever I guess?
And again they target a North American audience.
High quality content
Let’s give credit to the guy where he deserves it. Some of his recent content can be pretty interesting.
Monetizing videos is harder than ever. The adpocalypse hit hard and pushed YouTubers to seek alternate ways of earning money such as sponsorships and Patreon. On the surface it’s not a big deal for us viewers and the idea isn’t bad at all if it really pays out in the end and doesn’t end up worse that the preroll ads.
Sponsors segments are no longer funny, they’re the unfunny joke that keeps getting told over and over until someone decides to change their slogan (Squarespace for example). Some other sponsors are irrelevant to the content been watched and I’m genuinely impressed that a shampoo brand hasn’t sponsored anyone I watch yet.
For sponsors to appeal to their viewer they need to be relevant and unlike TV they must not be the same copy/pasted speech that everyone knows and that doesn’t actually differ much from one channel to the other.
Pushing Patreon or some other pay wall is not as bad but it can still be tiring to end a video and have 2 or 3 minutes where the names of the Patreon subscribers are being shown or read… This is a waste of bandwidth and artificially increases the length of videos (to trick the algorithm maybe).
This also feels a bit like shaming the non paying viewer.
Sadly I have no viable solution to this issue. Revenue is never secured in this kind of business.
Recommendation
There are a couple of channels that are genuinely good, don’t clickbait and produce content with substance, I will highlight more in details these in a later post. In the meantime I’ll just list them here:
Gamers Nexus: Current tech, benchmarks, news and actual research with so much integrity put into their videos that it feels weirdly honest (in a good way);
Honorable mention to Level 1 Techs (Level 1 Linux) for Wendell’s Linux coverage and hardware (but I still don’t like their news coverage).
At the time of publishing, these YouTuber are light on sponsors and put forward their content before anything else. There’s much more passion coming out of what they do.
Conclusion
LinusTechTips is becoming really irrelevant outside of the benchmarking of new hardware and new hardware isn’t released that often.
The videos are boring, clickbaity, irrelevant to my interest and full of sponsors that are irrelevant.
Just to be clear I’m not attacking anyone. I just don’t enjoy them anymore. I couldn’t care less if the channel were to shutdown, their success doesn’t affect me and I don’t want to be frustrated with the new “content” they produce.
They do not need me nor my subscription.
Update 26/01/2021
I decided to review this post recently. I replaced a channel I recommend because my views have changed and didn’t appreciate much some of the content that came out a couple months ago.
To this day I have not resubbed nor watch any of their videos, I still don’t feel the need and I’m not really sad about it anymore. I don’t miss it.
Tech YouTube is kind of boring to be honest and it’s fine that way, we need more facts than entertainment.
I’ve also added a new section about early 2021 just to show what the uploads look like. I still don’t like it.
Update 13/03/2022
I removed MKBHD from the sponsor list because I can’t really get behind his reviews anymore and the sponsor situation went from bad to worse because he is now promoting Cash App (easy way to send, receive and invest money apparently).
I strongly believe that no one should be recommending financial apps and companies as part of sponsors. What’s next ? Getting sponsored by hygiene products to get my balls shaved and fix my male pattern baldness ?
I find these sponsors highly inappropriate.
LTT allegedly has a video about making a Pi-Hole (reddit comment), which is pretty ironic coming from someone with such opinion on ad blocking.
While I do understand that content is more often than not paid by some sort of ad revenue (sponsors included), ad blocking is not piracy and not copyright infringement.
To not stay on a bad note I’d like to congratulate Gamers Nexus on being great and always going above and beyond no matter what they do. This is what tech channels should be about.
I hope I didn’t jinx it until the next update?
Update 25/08/2022
LTT messed up with claiming they’ll not support warranties, then going back on that before and saying they’ll take care of that without being specific, and then caving in and having a written warranty for their new backpack.
It has been shown on LTT’s WAN Show that even Luke, a long time partner of Linus, is tired of this drama and doesn’t exactly agree with the events.
LTT released a shirt, making Linus giggle like a child while Luke looks like he was dying inside and I find this kind of reaction really saddening coming from Linus (who I looked up to at some point).
While I do understand that being a huge influencer with over 14.8M subscribers might change one’s mindset and bring out their worst, especially when they are not trying to hide their personal life all that much, I feel deep regret in following that channel years ago.
I’m congratulating Gamers Nexus on their stance where they said they’ll treat LTT the same as any manufacturer and this is how a honest business should operate and how reviewer should call out whatever is wrong.
Gamers Nexus is to me the most trustful reviewing outlet for computer hardware.
Please be the exception to dying a hero or living long enough to become the villain.
Update 14/08/2023
Gamers Nexus have just posted a video highlighting some of the problems related to ethics, accuracy and responsibility with LinusTechTips.
Gamers Nexus is a very reputable channel that does some very good investigations and will not hesitate to make corrections when they make mistakes. They explain all of their processes and rerun benchmarks to update the charts and their data points to make sure they will not misrepresent anything.
