Setup

[dannyfrombelgium]

Hey,

This is probably the wrong place for this request, but I couldn't find another way to get in touch.

I'm looking to set up this program, but I'm basically a complete amateur. Me and my friends play an unhealthy amount of MK64 and have needed something like this for a while. Do you have a simple step by step guide in terms of what we'll need to buy and do in order to get this up and running?

Cheers

[davepacheco]

There's no such guide, but I could help out if you're really interested.

We built an AppleScript/web application that runs on OS X and makes it fairly user-friendly to record race videos and upload them to Joyent's Manta storage service. And it's fairly easy to automatically process the videos on a regular basis. But it's not realistic that you're going to be able to set this up and maintain it without being comfortable with the terminal, at least not without more work from someone else to make that process smoother.

[dannyfrombelgium]

I think given time I could get reasonably comfortable using the terminal. I'll at least give it a try. My main concern was just simple confusion as to how you actually go about setting this up. I assume I'll first need some sort of splitter to link up the N64 to my Mac, then using your program I'd record the races and then they are analysed (in terms of race statistics etc) as part of the uploading process. I know that's a very simplified explanation, but is it vaguely right?

I'm probably wildly out of my depth here, so thanks for replying man! This is such a great idea too, so well done.

[davepacheco]

The two components that I purchased were:

• iGrabber: I bought this one on Amazon. This captures video from the N64 and connects to a Mac using USB. This one's discontinued, but there are similar devices out there. I'm not sure if the software will be the same or not.
• a distribution amplifier: I bought this one on Amazon. This is just like splitter, but a normal splitter reduces the signal strength when it splits it. This device is powered and preserves the original signal strength.

The iGrabber comes with software that lets you save the video. The little AppleScript app that we wrote lets you fill in people's names in a web form and hit a button to start recording the videos. Then it uploads the videos and player names to Joyent's Manta service. Elsewhere, I have a server that runs jobs periodically to process the videos in Manta. The video processing part automatically figures out which course you're racing and which characters are playing.

So the whole thing works like this:

• User enters people's names in a web form and hits "Record".
• Mac captures video via USB using the iGrabber.
• The video and the player's names get uploaded together to Manta.
• A server processes the videos and generates the data for kartlytics.com.

You can run all of this yourself (i.e., your own clone of kartlytics.com), or you could upload videos somewhere and I could include them on kartlytics.com.