Hi!

First of all I'd like to note how much I appreciate that this community exists! High quality longplays are an excellent resource and reference and very much underappreciated. I was directed here after I asked a similar question on TASVideos.

So basically, I'm currently learning machine learning and I'm looking to use gameplay footage as training data for my experiments. While there are a lot of longplays available on YouTube, many of them by members of this community, that would seemingly be an excellent source, those universally suffer from compression artifacts stemming from video processing. In addition, it would be super useful to use data from RAM to teach the neural network. For this purpose, emulator movie files are perfect, because I can take original quality screenshots and log memory. Unfortunately, the best resource for emulator movie files is TASVideos, but TASes have the explicit goal of beating the game as fast as possible, while for machine learning you want as much footage of the game as possible, and those two goals are at odds!

So my primary question is, is a collection or database of movie files which are not TASes or speedruns? I was told that many videos produced for WoL have been recorded in emulator movie format and encoded into video. Are those movie files available? If not, I think it would be an amazing initiative to start collecting and publishing those. Longplay and completionist movie files would surely prove useful to a lot of people!

There are so many people always seeking for easy popularity and they'll find every loophole to succeed. Not many years ago there were reaction channels, they essentially recorded themselves watching other copyrighted content and they made a big deal of money instead of the original creator.

You would be amazed. But we fight everyday battles with people trying to reupload hundreds of our videos on youtube just from our download section, let alone having the input recordings available. Through input recording they can render it any way they like, and in any quality. You can join certain official TAS communities on internet as some of them actually do provide their input recording files for the sake of beating world records and similar things. As ScHlAuChi said feel free to join our discord and look for him if you wish to discuss this topic into more detail.

Are there truly people who bother stealing longplay videos? I'm disappointed. Although I really doubt people who'd do something so pointless would bother rendering emulator movie files. More likely they would just download and reupload the video you're already offering.

Having movie files available under a license such as creative commons (requiring attribution/credit) would make World of Longplays a really useful resource for researchers and TASers. A movie file is like a catalogue of savestates on steroids, you can seek to any point in the game and continue from there to test some level or check some character's messages! I encourage you to consider at least allowing your uploaders to submit movie files if they're not afraid of plagiarism. I might even submit some longplays myself then :)

I totally second ScHlAuChi's answer. Input recordings are really personal thing, and having them available for everyone would be a disaster, as many people would try to use them for fast building their youtube channels leading to copyright hell, imagine a movie that plays the same but is published on dozens of places. Best way is always if everyone has their own gameplay recorded it is guarantied that every person will have played differently and have different movie, instead of just one circling around.

Yep, we use the same emulator that TASVideos uses - Bizhawk.
So most longplays do indeed have input recordings.

The reason why we dont provide them to the public is, because it makes stealing our videos even easier than it already is. Even worse, evil people could use them against us, by dumping those videos, uploading them before we do and then claim we stole them.

As for quality, dont use Youtube, download them from our website for much superior quality! Regarding the input recordings, talk to me on Discord and we can discuss things.