Pokercast.tv

longer latest videos

hey, just a random idea to make my life easy and maybe other users. was wondering if you could implement a drop down on the latest videos so show more in case you missed them, sometimes they slip of the front page and it makes them hard to find as i am intrested in watching the latest videos whatever they may be, so im not looking specfically for a certain catergory of show. it be nice to see either a drop down for the last 20 latest videos or a search function or caterogry based on the latest/newest vids.

thanks,
tom

Well since the streaming update, not much happened. 

but after HSP ended, I decided slowly that it would be good, as a reward for your fidelity, to make some changes.

This site has never been as many others are, that means, big enterprises doing investments . It's a one man operated site, and therefore , it takes a lots of work to be competitive in a daily basis, to be up to date.

It seems that poker tv show are appearing more and more often on cable tv, that means plenty work for me and as such, I decided to automate the website functions so I could breath and maybe why not, take some vacations ;)

So that part as been done and I m really glad it is working so I can get some time for me now. 

For the site's  first birthday , I wanted to offer a new design, as well as a new logo, hoping a better brand would born,  with a real identity. 

Well this is too soon to say if this was successful but from my point of view, it sounds ok;  

a clean design associated with a professional logo,  the new pokercast.tv was born!  

Thanks all for making this happen 

I spent last 10 days working on a more reliable solution for streaming videos. 

With some external help, it has been implemented on this site:   a similar setup as youtube for instance, using lighttpd with its module h264 

We get a bandwitch reduction and moreover the possibility to seek in the video's timeline, giving a lot more confort to users, especially with videos that are over 40 minutes average.

The system is running for few days now and it s seems to be okay.

I will look now at optimizing  again the quality and maybe doing custom conversion settings depending of the input file.

3 weeks after moving to this huge server, pretty expensive for me btw...  things are getting done. traffic has been increasing a lot last 2 weeks. the site is really taking off with some big sites now linking directly to here. 

The faster server probably convinced more users to come on here with a response time that has decrease at least 5 times compared to the celeron. 

With this quad core, I can now fully work on video conversion and test more settings. Before it was taking around 3h30 to convert a 360mb files,  with same settings it will take 20min now and this also a main reason to traffic increase, since videos are up on here before anywhere else. 

I have recently been working on compiling ffmpeg from svn. doing a built from svn including all recent librairies, such as x264, latest lib theora and many others. Since the goal is the quality for this site and its future server, coming next month (we will be running a 2TO quad core , top notch box believe me) I m working on all server side installation..

Most of the aspects are pretty easy in fact. FFmpeg, so important for a video site, is pretty much the most complicated task that I have to do with the server admin.

I had the luck, previously, to meet Robert Swain from ffmpeg google code project, that did the actual ffmpeg install. That was worth every pennies and I can't recommend you enough to check his blog. http://rob.opendot.cl/

I wouldn't you to expect to be as lucky as I was, since he got a new job you won't probably be able to request him any freelance.

Therefore.. having a read at this tutorial could be useful for you.

Since I have a poker site, I have been constantly struggling against everyone.

As a small unknown site, it is very hard to get advertized by bigger site. And there is several simple reasons for that: 

Look at the following: you go to a forum and post a link to pokertube, no one will say shit about that. If you post about this site, then they ll call it spam. How funny is that, since from my point of views, videos available on here are way better than the one of the concurrence. In fact you get here the best quality poker streaming around.

Because all this internet segment is a big mafia. And the biggest sites just want to get bigger and send only traffic to their friends! The content is not really important. Important is the collective image that people have about a website.  Posting  a link from youtube is not the same as posting a link from pokercast.tv. The video could be the same of course. This isn't the question.

People have their routine and hardly walk away from that. That's why I d ask to the few of you that will read this post to help me getting a little more traffic, if you like the content the site provide,  of course. If you think this is crap, then follow your way, no hard feeling. 

There is a very easy way to tell your friend about this place, a one click contact importer so you can retrieve all mailing contact simply and quickly.  You can also use the social bookmark facilities so your friends know the videos you are watching at 

I want to keep things going on and improve everything that can be, so this little thing could help me drastically, as it is really hard to be known in the poker world.

Thanks everyone

Since I am back at pokerstars, I decided to play some micro mtt's, mostly the 40k gtd 5$ RB/A that starts at night (in europe I mean).

I have been running very good I guess. Doing like 5 itm in 6 tournament. Yesterday I felt it wasn't going my way on the 5rb so I register for a 4.4$ 1k field capped, 2k gtd.. (pretty low yea..) 

It was a 4 handed table, I gotta say this fit my donkey style way better than full ring.. really dislike fr.. 

I started running pretty good right at the beginning, no special luck , playing normally, maybe more aggro than others since I tripled my stack very quickly. I stayed in the top 5 for over 4 hours I guess and I was chip leader for a pretty long time; at a point I had over 100k more than the second in chip , with bb at 2k.. 

I had drunk too much scotch the night before and honestly I was getting really tired.. feeling bad  and the top 50 took around 3 hours to blow.

I have been pretty lucky in the last part of the torney.. no doubt while one win a mtt. The stack also allowed me to play much more gamble vs shorts than I d be doing usually, and I got successful, finally

After we made a deal with top 3 I had around 950k , the cl 1.2KK and a crazy russian "crasher" 750K so I found myself with 440$;  was pretty good deal since it could have taken age to be over, was really willing to go sleep. 
So after that , I just donked out the 2 others guys pretty fast and that was it, my first serious mtt win !!

This server is up for over 2 weeks now and yet , we don't have any mailing system working..

When this doesn't seems a big issue, in fact it can be a problem: a public site should be able to be contacted for any kind of reasons. 

Plus, users are not really able to interact between each others, new accounts can't be verified via link click confirmation, no newsletter... well , kinda bad right?

Let's hope this will  be solved in the next few days ;)

After some hours, Robert Swain from the ffmpeg project had done most of his job.

He tested mp4 conversions on several quality levels and commands; some results were incredibly good, using HD original video from vimeo, but as expected, very heavy sized.

He found a good consensus for .avi movies and I personally love the result. Just have a look at the latest Poker After Dark and it is really top notch. 

So now on , I can seriously start working with videos. 

Due to server (possible) overload, I disabled users uploading temporarily. This will be back of course but this is not the most important right now, sorry folks

Since I am in charge of everything, this includes uploading latest videos.

Apart from this weird episode with 2M2MM that took over the rest for the last 2 months (lol indeed) , I thought time came to put serious stuff on here. Quality stuff, unlike this show.

For example, the season 6 of Poker After Dark is a big success in the general opinion: the line up is probably one of the best ever in a cash game poker tv show. 

This is cool since probably  GSN will have this in mind when producing their season 6 and they now know they have  serious concurrence. I personally hope Sammy Fahra will be back, that show isn't the same without him.

So , back to this idea about starting the real video stuff, I decided it was more than time to increase the speed of the development of this site.

But since the beginning there was always problem after problems, for pretty much everything. Video gallery was no exception, as it's always a very delicate software and not very easy to use standart settings for a customized server. 

Right now: we got very good remote streaming working. Rick made a great job updating his remote plugin for Jomtube.  
I just hire some guy from the ffmpeg google code summer team to set up h264 video conversion properly. Well right now this is a big hope for me. If this really works one day, this site won't be the same, trust me. Having high quality h264/AAC encoding WORKING is a must for any videos site.  If you think about pokertube and its crappy 10min videos quality, you understand why I m saying that this site would get loads of poker fan willing to watch the good show.

But currently, it seems that biggest files won't convert. Tests on rather small movies files are being quite successful  in my opinion.  I can't give up anyway, I feel I m just so close to achieve that idea that grew up after the season 5 of HSP:  building a nice poker video site. 

The new server is behaving fine, it gives a very nice connectivity and unlimited traffic. Some people made downloads yesterday at almost 3mb/s . They were capping their home connection obviously ;) at the yesterday activity pic, this was sending almost 50mb/s to customers. 

S o yes, this switch was really a good move from me. Let's hope the final details, so important, will be done as soon as possible.

Cheers

Hi all I was ready to put the seventh part of the show, waiting like so many for its appearance somewhere on the internet. Then I decided to stop streaming this poker show. Since this started, pressure on people in the poker internet world have been made constantly in the way to stop "ilegal" files or streaming.

This started with Pokerbay.org that stopped to offer the torrent file, maybe a first for a torrent site dedicated to poker show.I think we can agree there s a big difference between streaming a top box office movie and this show but.. for obvious reasons, they decided not to take the risk to do it anymore.

Few by few, you could see that it was getting more complicated every weeks to find this, except maybe on pokertube that has probably a juicy deal with them, since they can.. good for them.. in this world you can do everything with money right? Nothing new here. 
Regarding me and my little crappy site, I was targeted, for some obscures reasons, by their legal services. Since my others site is/was hosted in US, it didn't took so long before they got it shutdown. This happened twice: first I was hosting files ,then just because I was using the embed code. This second option seems "ilegal" too in the US internet law. 
So I gave up with this server and decided to use this little place, since it's hosted in France. Curiously, I didn't receive any mail from my hosting company (the biggest in France) ordering me to remove it. Seems like it's not so easy to act in an international way. 
But I did receive a mail sometimes ago, I believe like a week ago but I only saw it today since I dont often check this mail. Looking at my friend site alwaysbluff.com that was linking to me, he apparently had to desist too. And since I personally don't even watch the show (I didn't even look at the latest episode yet), since I am a poor person, I decided I already did all I could for the poker community and I am not willing to put myself in risk in any way, so said that, I am just going to stop streaming this on here.

Here is the mail I am talking about. For europeans like me, we don't really know who Comcast is but if you ask to americans, it sounds a really bad idea to go against their will. 

"I write on behalf of G4 Media, Inc. (“G4”) and represent G4 with respect to its intellectual property matters. It has come to our attention that the website at www.freepokerbankroll.org is streaming episodes of 2M2MM created by G4 and originating from G4’s website at www.g4tv.com without authorization (the “Materials”). The unauthorized Materials include those at the following link:

http://www.freepokerbankroll.org/2M2MM-Ep-5.html

G4 is the exclusive owner of the copyrights in the Materials, and the posting and distribution of the Materials constitutes willful infringement of such copyrights entitling G4 to injunctive relief and monetary damages. 
Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §512(c), G4 hereby notifies you of the aforementioned infringement, and requests that you immediately remove the Materials from your website. 
It is my understanding that the above information is accurate, and I hereby swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am authorized to act on behalf of G4’s infringed rights. 
Further, G4 has a good-faith belief that the use of its copyrights in the Materials is not authorized by G4, its agent(s), or the law. 
Please respond within two (2) business days indicating that the Materials have been removed.

My contact information is below. 
Thank you for your anticipated and timely cooperation in this matter.

Sincerely, Tami C. Solomon"

IP Paralegal, Business & Legal Affairs
Comcast Entertainment Group (E! | style. | G4tv | FEARnet)
5750 Wilshire Blvd. | Los Angeles, CA 90036
Tel: (323) 692-4406 | Fax: (323) 954-2770
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