Greetings adventure fans! We're happy to present an early sneak peak at the forthcoming final version of the Double Fine Adventure series. Since the end of the series we've been working to prepare this release by spending time that we didn't have during production to improve the overall quality. This includes new color treatments, noise reduction, english subtitles, two new commentary tracks featuring 2 Player and Double Fine, removing Broken Age spoiler blurs, new encoding settings, and improved metadata.
The series is still in production, but we wanted to deliver an early preview of episode 1 "A Perfect Storm for Adventure" here on VHX so we could get your feedback. Since VHX automatically encodes every video uploaded to work within it's system, we're offering this new version of episode 1 as a downloadable zip file that you can find in the "Extras" listing. This way we can be sure you're getting the file exactly as we intended. We'll continue to work with VHX to improve the experience, eventually replacing all the streaming versions of the videos with the new files.
Here you can see the detail lost in Tim's shirt from data compression.
There has been much discussion about presenting the series in it's highest quality both internally and amongst the viewers. We're trying to find the best balance of quality and file size, but something that also has to be taken into account is that the series wasn't produced with top of the line equipment, so even our master quality footage will leave much to be desired from your average videophile. At a point, the quality return on increasing the bit rate just doesn't justify the inflated file size.
After downloading the new mp4 file you should be able to load it up in your player of choice and/or add it to your media library. You should be able to turn subtitles on or off from within your player controls, and the new audio tracks should be selectable as well. In iTunes as an example, you'll find audio and subtitles listed under "Controls" in your menu bar. We're curious to hear about the experience in other media players, so if you encounter strange issues please let us know!
*We have noticed issues with embedded subtitles playing back in Windows Media Player. A stand alone .srt file is included in the zip in case you have problems with the embedded ones.
We thank you again for supporting this project, and hope you enjoy the new features!