Show HN: multi-perspective StarCraft 2 web replays

This is a weekend project of mine - looking for some feedback from the HN community.<p>Basically you upload your .SC2Replay files and I'll convert them into web replays. My twist is I make recordings from 2 players perspectives and show em both to you on the same page (sync'd of course). I have some other options as well, but I'm really looking for feedback on what things people do not like and what things you think would be cool.<p>From a bootstrap/startup perspective, my goal for this was to produce something that would scale decently with almost no $ investment. Have this running on 1 ec2 micro, static pages and assets (js,css,img) being served up by github pages. Dynamic pages are being served directly from memcached via nginx module (pages are stored already gzipped). If anyone is interested in the implementation details I'd be willing to share cuz I think some of the techniques I used could help others looking to bootstrap their own webapp.<p>I also have a mobile version so you can watch em on your phone. <a href="http://m.ggreplayz.com" rel="nofollow">http://m.ggreplayz.com</a>

My suggestions:<p>1- Ditch youtube<p>2- Start transcoding both into one video instead of two like it is now, so when I seek I have both timed up correctly<p>3- Use your own video player (goes with #1)<p>4- Modify homepage to be more "imgur" like- Move the browse button off of the "get started" page to the homepage.<p>5- Get a video ad network in place (many to choose from- integration takes about a hour) and start profiting from embeds<p>I know the argument on using youtube. Its easy, its free, they have a ad program you get a cut of. Its still worth it to roll your own if you get this to take off- You want to be "the easiest way to share your replay"

Just seems like a confusing mess to me, with controls on each video and sync'ed controls on the side. If you can't hide the individual video controls, I'd merge the two videos into a single video stream before embedding it. That's how bad I find the UI. Have you sat any people down in front of this thing and watched what they clicked? First thing I did was hide that huge sidebar covering the video, then I messed with the individual controls and figured out that is not good, then finally brought the sidebar back...

Some thoughts on your user base.<p>1. Individuals who want to share replays with friends.<p>2. Professional teams who want a scalable way of taking video of their players' games and hosting them on their sites.<p>3. Tournaments that want to host all their games in video format (don't want to distribute replays) but have scalability problems in doing so. They may be tentative about uploading such replays to your site, so a more formal partnership might work better.<p>4. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on mobile platforms.<p>5. Individuals who want to "watch replays" on machines that can't handle sc2 (or people who don't own a copy of SC2).<p>The need for replay watching is somewhat diminished compared to the days of Broodwar, when there was a dearth of videos of games available (nowadays, youtube videos of games are just <i>everywhere</i>). Where you might find success, is with groups who are really keen on watching replays of games that are one of those one in a million kind of games that weren't broadcast for a tournament. (I remember there was one such game -- Sea vs Savior -- during Blizzcon 2008 that was only played backstage and was basically never shown to the public)

As I understand it, all of the "create a build order from the replay" sites/tools out there suffer inaccuracy because a replay file is just a list of input actions. There's no distinguishing between building a probe, queueing a probe, not having enough money to build a probe, and being supply blocked.<p>People try to model what the game does but without actually reimplementing all of SC2 perfectly, you'll still have bugs.<p>I think, on the other hand, if you had a video taken with the production tab open, and did some really simple image processing to determine what is being built at any given time, you could do a lot better than everyone else.<p>(I've been kicking this idea around for a while but never got past playing around with a single .PNG, and it looks like you have all the hard .sc2replay -&#62; video stuff worked out already!)

What audience are you targeting?<p>Not to be a negative Nancy but I think that pro teams won't find it useful in analyzing games simple because a video deprives you of control. You can't switch tabs, can't go to an arbitrary place on the map and can't increase the game speed. All you can do is watch the game from multiple perspectives, something you can almost do inside the game (press 1, watch for 5 seconds, press 2 and you get the picture).<p>Amateur players might find it useful when sharing their replays with friends, but how can that be monetized? A lot of gamers are reluctant to pay for premium content like GSL/MLG, I doubt they would want to pay for sharing video-replays with their friends.<p>Anyway, it's always cool to see things like this, things with a bit of magic :) Good job!

For me (bottom-Diamond who generally only plays to boost friends), the feature I'm looking for here is to be to critique or annotate games - my killer interface would be a cross between GNU screen and an American football play highlighter thing (I'm afraid I don't know the technical term). Pretty much anything that's not social I can get better from the official client, so my feedback to you would be to focus on the things that I can share with my friends.

Doesn't maintain sync. YouTube is wonky sometimes and while trying it out one video started but the other was still queueing. Finally they both started playing but at different time markers. Hitting pause and then play also did not sync the games together.

Maybe worth tweaking the site to fit on the iPad

how does this work on a technical level? are you running a copy of sc2 and basically just replaying the replay?