MetaTalk posts tagged with rifftrax

7th Annual MST Club Holiday Video Marathon Social Distancing Edition

JHarris — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 16:48:58 -0800

It's time again for that weird thing we do, which is program 72 hours of specials, bad Christmas movies, MST3K episodes and other things. It's MST Club's 2020 Holiday Video Marathon! We usually put this in for intermittent yuletide jollies and destress, to help people relax at an often frustrating time of year. This year, with so many people sensibly staying home for the holidays, it promises both to be less and more stressful than usual. Anyone can come by and watch weird stuff with us, members or not! Our show runs from December 23 through to midnight December 25. Details inside! Previous years: 2019 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 We have a chat room attached so people can joke along with the show, but it's fine to lurk or have us on in the background! We do this by the seats of our collective pants, but we have a vague sort of theme schedule. We are open to reading the crowd to see what people would like though. Our plans (times are Eastern) are: DEC 23: Morning: specials, riffing Afternoon: Rankin-Bass Evening-Night: MST3K and other riffing, miscellaneous DEC 24: Morning: more specials Early afternoon: Christmas episodes of old TV shows -- Jack Benny, Burns & Allen Evening-Night: MST3K and other riffing, our favorite specials DEC 25: Morning: Quiet time -- Yule logs, specials Afternoon: Our standards -- classic riffing Evening-Night: Winding down, non-holiday fare Our moderator list this year is TheSnakeOfArgument, valkane, StarkRoads, Satri and TV's Ilana. oneswellfoop might be helping too but has been having computer issues lately. Some of our items are from the Rifftrax catalog. While we have a terrific hodge-podge of material from them, we try to make sure that everything we have is bought and paid for. Please give them your support!

MST Club Video Marathon 2017: Christmas In SPAAAACE

JHarris — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 05:56:01 -0800

This is MST Club announcing our 4^th annual "No Stress" Christmas Video Marathon! No Stress means it's pretty laid back as far as marathons go: feel free to have it going on in the background to cooking, sleeping, football or whatever, or exchange jokes with us in the chat window. The primary site of this thing is the MST Club Cytube page, with our Rabb.it room as a possible alternate if things go awry. The time is throughout December 24 and 25, from 6 AM Eastern/ 3 AM Pacific through to Midnight on the 25th. Come by with or without your favorite nog if you like! More details are in the extended description. Previous threads: 2014 - 2015 - 2016 The MST Club Christmas Marathon is intended to be a destress hangout spot for MeFi members and people just wanting to relax and laugh a bit during the holidays. Marathon contents include:

Riffing videos, including Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes (with an emphasis on Christmas fare), RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic (paid-for copies of those).
Christmas specials good, bad and just funny.
Short Christmas-related, generally humorous material.
Miscellaneous stuff, including some new material not seen in previous marathons that I'd like to keep as a surprise. Not everything is Christmas related, but currently most of it is. I'm testing the waters concerning how much non-Christmas material we should use.

Last year we tried a strict schedule kind of thing, but it chafed a bit, especially when technical issues prevented us from watching the thing scheduled for that moment. So this year we're keeping things flexible, and going with general themes for different times. Our room mods are free to choose what exactly is airing, from our library of yuletide wonderments and atrocities, or go their own way, or accept requests from the audience. (It helps if the video is on YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion, and if it's not blocked in many countries.) The main advice for watching that I have to offer is to try to watch from a Flash-capable browser. Most of the stuff should be viewable from plain HTML, but in the past we've had issues with some sites, especially Vimeo and Dailymotion. Dailymotion in particular has a wealth of Christmas specials and related videos. If you're on a Mac using Firefox or Chrome should be good enough. I don't think there are good solutions for iPads and most Android, unfortunately, but give it a try even if that's your only opinion. The alternate room, the Rabb.it one, won't see much use unless something drastic goes wrong with the cytu.be room, but there is one major thing watchable there that we can't at the moment see in the main room: the Christmas episode in MST3K Season 11. If we try to switch over to watch it there, it'll probably be towards the end on December 25. Further details, updates and last-second corrections will appear in this thread. We'll be meeting in the cytube room this evening (on the 23rd that is) for preparations if you want to drop by a bit early and say hello.

2nd Annual MeFi MST3K Club Holiday Stream

JHarris — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 15:29:37 -0800

Last year, instead of our usual MST3K Club showing around that time of week, we instead ran a holiday video marathon, a multi-day stream of MST3K and related content. The idea was to have a lot of things running continuously, so people who just wanted to hang out and watch some yuletide nonsense at odd moments could drop by, hang out for a bit, get in some laughs, then return to family/booze/bed, no matter the hour. A low maintenance, no guilt kind of marathon. We are trying it again this year, in the usual MST3K Club sync-video room. For more details, click through.... From last year, edited for accuracy: I call it a "stream," but really it's a little weirder than that. The website we've been using is sync-video.com. It's not technically a streaming site, but a place that coordinates streams from other sources. Most often this is YouTube, but they now have an option that lets you coordinate other videos on the internet, even if they're not hosted on streaming servers. How does that work? Well what I think happens is, its Flash applet downloads the video, then cues it up to the proper place. It starts playing it before the download is finished, so the delay is usually just a couple of seconds. The site thus tries to keep everyone watching approximately the same thing at the same time. And it provides a text chat room too, which is perfect. Some of the things we're showing are quite large, so what I have done is use the audio/video Swiss Army Knife that is ffmpeg to split them into five-minute chunks, put those in the ever-helpful oneswellfoop's webspace, and loaded them into playlists. Each chunk is small enough that it doesn't take that long to load. The playlists themselves are several, so we can change things up as need be, but also can play long things overnight. We've been doing this for our weekly showings for about a year now, so we have a pretty good sense of the system's strengths and weaknesses, so the problems we had keeping things going last time, while still there, should be much less of an issue now. Even so, I ask you bear with us, as it is entirely a duct-tape-and-bubble-gum kind of arrangement. Our usual audience at MST Night is from six to ten people, but this being Christmas, the number could be anything, from zero (a real possibility) to dozens. Last year we topped out at about seven viewers at once. I'd like to keep participants mostly to members, but if you have friends who want to watch I'm okay with it, so long as they don't become overwhelming. Some of the things we're watching I'm comfortable sharing with relatively low numbers of people, but not with the Internet At Large. Further notes for 2015:

Why am I using "we" everywhere? Habit. Really, most of this is just me. However, if you'd like to help us run the show this year, like if you're going to be awake overnight or throughout the day and can help us keep things going, please contact me via MeMail. I was the weakest link last time, and there were times when I fell asleep, the video ended, and sync-video seized up and nothing was playing for a bit.
If you have suggestions for things to add, get in contact via MeMail! Especially if it's already on YouTube, those things are the best. This year's content is: YouTube MST episodes, some riffing from other sources, Space Ghost Christmas content and rarities, a number of particular holiday specials (including one that's especially relevant considering what just hit theaters, hint hint), and a little non-holiday and non-riffing, but still weirdly ridiculous, video.
The time frame I'm planning for this is December 23-25. It might extend for a bit after depending on demand, but last year it got pretty light towards the end so there were no objections to calling it quits when it was time to finish.

I have my own projects and writing that I'm going to be working during this time, and of course it's Christmas and I also have family to visit with, so at various times I may not be in the sync-video chat room. Please take this whole business as the light-hearted and whimsical video show/riffing practice/emotional support/virtual egg nog buddy it's intended to be. An alternative to 24 Hours Of A Christmas Story! That's all. I hope you can drop by this year!