As many have figured out, these are pre-generated mp4 files. There's no 'magic' in the video files themselves (i.e. the video is not generated on the fly)
That was my first idea and when i found out the video url i was quite pleased to figure out the solution.
Then the "generated" folder made me think, and i decided to test it a bit more, so i started the experience at 15:00 and 35 seconds, just the right amount to get to the time reveal just after the clock change, and i was blown away, the video shows 15:01 and not 15:00 as i expected, whatever they are doing here to replace the video at the exact time without us noticing it is quite crazy.
I'm reading here various conspiracy theories about how the current time was inserted by one technical trick or another. We should at least consider the possibility that this was simply a preview of the matrix we all live in, and to prepare us for waking up in a vat of mucus.
Actually, that world was also a simulation. The machines realized that some people wouldn’t accept the program that their primitive brains kept trying to wake up from. So they made an imperfect world but some people still wanted to wake up. Thus, they made a “real world” where people thought they had woken up, but where a blind neo was able to still able to sense the machines.
What if you’re never really sure you exited the simulation? LOL
When you’re dreaming, you often think you’re awake. But when you’re awake, you KNOW it. How?
people on reddit have noticed that different clips are played each time you view either pill. ive clicked the pills maybe 20 times so far and theres at least one new clip each time. it looks like they pre-rendered for each time and spread out a ton of clips across all those times. so the computers that are serving this just have a ton of videos and change which ones they are giving out once per minute, compensating for time-zones. pretty simple. but a great result. i feel like this is the most compelling advertising ive seen in my adult life.
i think its interesting that they chose the pre-rendered approach to this. pre-rendered and FMV is a very interesting space right now. there seems to be a revival stirring. take for example "at dead of night." its a horror game thats pre-rendered and uses FMV and does it perfectly to stunning effect. people liked it, markipliers lets play got something like 7M views IIRC. and the previous game by that same person was a full FMV murder mystery game and it is very compelling indeed. nobody has seen these concepts fleshed out in the modern world where storage is dirt cheap and video games are taken seriously. new life is going to be breathed into these concepts and i think it will be very exciting.
there was 1 really good one that actually used characters instead of images (and those were all so terrible looking) that I've been searching for years (literally since 2005) - some motivated young child of Zion should use that notcurses lib posted yesterday and make a super high fidelity version.
I've tried all the new ones and haven't found any that seem half-decent. Anyone know of any advancements in this sector?
Fun fact, xlockmore and xscreenSaver updated to include the Matrix effect on April 22nd and 27th 1999, respectively. That was less than a month after the 1999 film's release, and several months before it was available on VHS or DVD. So these folks based their screensavers off what they could remember from seeing it in theaters.
Maybe you're talking about Windows, I don't really know. But I gotta say, I wrestled through using Ubuntu ca. 2010s because they included a cool Matrix wallpaper by default. That's cooler than knowing how to quit vim.
If I have a screensaver I want it to be that, or flying toasters. Not interested in anything else. No, not even Pipes or Starfield, as nostalgic as those are.
For folks who are having problems or are in a scenario where you can't see this (issue on mobile, text only browser, always reads the comments first, don't want to click on a thing that says "trailer"), here's what the link portrays:
Overall, the page is an ad for the new Matrix movies, a teaser for some upcoming trailer. It's a white screen showing a red pill on the left and a blue pill on the right. You click on one of the pills and a video starts streaming with a voice over, a-la one of Morpheus' speeches from the original. As you see the green "matrix digital rain" falling, you'll hear the same voice over per-pill each time, with both indicating something along the lines of "are you sure about what you know?" and right after that opening voice line the video will show the current time (very seamlessly, so it seems like it's always been a part of the video) and the actor doing the voice-over says the time right then.
In my case it was 10:59am when I played the video, so the overall effect was like this:
"Are you sure you know what you know?" ( <- paraphrasing)
Cut to large swooshing graphic of
the numbers "10:59" as the voice
actor says "ten fifty nine a.m."
Then the rest of the teaser plays.
No matter which you click on you get effectively the same thing, but with a different script and voice per pill color.
The audio tracks may be the same, but the video changes every minute. The videos contain (very) brief flashbacks to previous matrix movies as well as new footage - each scene gets less than a second, but the scenes shown change minute by minute.
so they can bring back reeves but not fishburne? fishburne says they never even called him. imagine being fishburne and not even getting a text message and the matrix 4 is filming.
Spoilers for a game that cannot be played in 2021 and can barely be watched on YouTube: Morpheus died in The Matrix Online and the filmmakers have stated the events in Online remain canon.
Speculation, but maybe it’s a “William Shatner wants to be in the new Star Trek reboot” situation where his presence made no sense in the context of the proposed story.
Each segment of the trailer is a different MP4. They are all hosted on the AWS CloudFront CDN. My guess is, like somebody stated, they pre-rendered many videos, and use a lambda at the edge to decode a GUID in the URL into a S3 path.
Those are probably not GUIDs but hashes used for cache busting. Changing them doesn't change the content. Running a lambda for this also seems uselessly costly.
They probably used concatenative audio rendering since the digits are tractable to get the actor to record. (Probably just on the borderline in terms of effort for now.) But can you imagine when they are able to use real time text to speech with high fidelity?
We're not far from emotive TTS + photo realistic rendering in a real time engine, potentially with neurally generated models to match real time events or camera input.
Matrix 5 will be this, but you'll be in the trailer, and it'll reference real world events. And that's just the start.
The future of audio and video is going to be crazy.
Disagree, the trilogy is one of the best Sci-Fi trilogies available and utilizes ideas about people and computing in unique ways. I always heard that the sequels didn’t live up to the hype and avoided them during release. It was only later that I rented them and found out I was taking advice from lowest common denominator action movie fans. I only label those fans like that because their criticism only makes sense if you treat and view the films as blockbusters (which I think they’re pretty good at too).
I never had issue with 2nd one it was pretty good when I watched it in cinema.
Anyhow I have rewatched all 3 a month ago. I was surprised how good 3rd one actually is. Now I am of opinion that all 3 are good.
Don't know what it is, probably I watching it through the prism of philosophical questions, the free will and whatnot. And also lore of the world. There are many details and hints in dialogues that you might missed, but explain quite a bit.
That said, nobody asked for Matrix 4, self contained story + neo and trinity dead. I am very sceptical about it. Ill watch it only if reviews are ok.
Perhaps a bit meta, but between a new Matrix reboot, this weekend's Rick & Morty finale, and previously even Midnight Gospel among quite a number of other cultural themes about meaning, reality, good & evil, nihilism, I'm feeling a little metaversed out and wondering whether this kind of entertainment is a healthy thing to indulge in.
The idea that it is good to be unmoored from our senses and experiences in favour of filtering them through this flavour of intellectual dissociation seems unhealthy. When I think of the artists behind it, if you are invested in someone's happiness, "red-pilling" them is not generous or sharing, it's self interested and adding company to misery, and I am doubting that this is art by people actuated by the wellbeing of others.
Don't forget Loki, or WandaVision for that matter.
I think there's been both qualitative and quantitative changes to American pop culture. Today's audience is able to handle more sophisticated or just convoluted complex narrative structures than in the past. From comic book cinematic universes to Christopher Nolan's gimmicks, we've come along way from straightforward standalone popcorn films. Now even dumb action movies have to be not just a sequel but intertextual, living within a cohesive fictional space. Everyone knows what "canon" refers to and most know common tropes. (Speaking of R&M, that show seems to be an example of running out of tropes to the extent of burning itself out, imploding into bigger and more meaningless reveals.)
That's also because of quantity. We've simply got too much content, across both films but TV shows, games, tie-in novels, comic books, and other media. Merchandising has been huge since the original Star Wars, but now every franchise has a Wiki and dedicated scholars. It's a whole new level of meta. Maybe that's the only way we can handle the scale of content we are bombarded by; to try to fit them together into cohesive contexts.
I don't know what that means for us as a society or as a culture, but I do note that The Matrix, or at least its sequels, helped to accelerate this process. Back in 2003, the series had both the Animatrix animated shorts and the Enter the Matrix video game that added to the story depicted on-screen, even introducing key characters that movie-only viewers would be confused by (such as the Kid).
I would say that dense intertextuality and cross-media world-building, not so much the Gnostic question your reality themes (which are old hat now), is the current defining legacy of The Matrix.
That's a valid concern and I think the cost/benefit equation has gradually been shifting towards "red-pilling".
-
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
I wonder if this has to do with copyright. It's easy to get the rights on content that was created in the last two decades. It's much harder to get rights on content that was created 70 years ago. The people involved are dead yet copyright (or some other intellectual property law) still applies.
Is it just me or does this feel kind of hamfisted? I think it would be a cool side detail to have (i.e. an analogue or digital clock shown somewhere in the trailer with the time), but it was kind of jarring and out of place to loudly hear the current time.
Sometimes you build something and realize the effect is too subtle. It has to seem a bit forced to get your brain to go "hey!" and then look at your clock.
I felt the same way. The way the narrator's line is obviously spliced together just detracts from the rest of the trailer for the sake of a party trick.
I really hope this doesn't turn out to foreshadow the movie as a whole.
this is kinda nice. you see guys, there is no need to look at the correct time and go and use "AI" to generate the speech and text in real time using the latest and greatest in tech.
you can just as simply pre record all time 1 to 59 and then join them. much easier and i dare say, much more elegant
It’s not a recording. Modern video editors/compositors can do batches with dynamic content. So someone had a list and just rendered all the segments out.
I just created a little tool to aid in the reverse engineering of the system that generates the URLs for each custom video segment. The filenames of each video are the result of hashing an "options" string plus a pepper value; this tool takes care of the hashing.
Just shooting from the hip, but streaming videos are all done as short 1-5 second chunks that are all listed in a playlist. They could have specific versions of the hour:minute with a specific playlist that includes the correct segment. When you click, the time is checked and the correct playlist is sent down the wire.
Edit: I opened up the dev tools, and did not see the typical HLS style segments. I saw several MP4 files intro/outro/etc. They could still have the segments ready to go, serve up the intro to buy time for the server to ```ffmpeg -i time.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4``` type of thing before serving to you
Probably to prevent changing the position to when the time is displayed before it should.
I started the video very close to 9:02 but was still 9:01, when the time was displayed on the video, it was actually 9:02, so I'm guessing they don't displayed the time of when the video started, but instead they display the exact time it should be when the time is displayed.
If you could change the position, this would break the affect, I can't pause either.
It's not just movies. There has been some interesting writing (none of which I've been able to find with google) about the ways in so many different aspects of western culture (and maybe more) have really gotten stuck for at least 30 years. Hair, fashion, cars, music, food, film, writing and more.
That feels like a lot of pressure to put on the 4th film of an action franchise. Might it be possible you could look out of mainstream? There's innovation at the edges.
I'm not sure what was better 20 years ago in terms of mainstream movies. The two biggest films of the year were book adaptions, the next two were CGI cartoons for kids, and the last of the top five was a remake of a movie from the 60s.
I just found out that there is a new Matrix movie and I am honestly a little bit horrified. I have zero confidence that the downhill progression in movie quality will somehow be turned around given the current state of Hollywood.
This is the sequel that broke the camel's back for you and not all of the other sequels, prequels, sidequels, spin-offs, reboots, remakes, retcons, and reimaginings that Hollywood has been indulging in since it was founded?
gregsadetsky|4 years ago
In https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/_nuxt/commons/a...
The client side generates an unobfuscated string such as:
red-a-b1-c1435-d-e2-f-g3-h2-i
where 1435 is the current local time (search for `key: "teaserSrcProps"` in the code to find the relevant function)
Then "17" is prepended to that string ("BOND_OBFUSCATION_SALT" in the source code), and then the video file name is simply the MD5 of the string.
To find the video URL:
:-)---
All 1440 red pill video URLs (tested all of them in bulk without downloading any using `wget --spider -i allurls.txt` — spider is a cool option!):
https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/cb4754d123f0ea1eae26820...
rvlt|4 years ago
Then the "generated" folder made me think, and i decided to test it a bit more, so i started the experience at 15:00 and 35 seconds, just the right amount to get to the time reveal just after the clock change, and i was blown away, the video shows 15:01 and not 15:00 as i expected, whatever they are doing here to replace the video at the exact time without us noticing it is quite crazy.
chakhs|4 years ago
sva_|4 years ago
Eriks|4 years ago
https://gist.github.com/EriksRemess/62f946bda713da80c7905d1c...
higgins|4 years ago
dynamite-ready|4 years ago
hirundo|4 years ago
EGreg|4 years ago
What if you’re never really sure you exited the simulation? LOL
When you’re dreaming, you often think you’re awake. But when you’re awake, you KNOW it. How?
abdel_nasser|4 years ago
i think its interesting that they chose the pre-rendered approach to this. pre-rendered and FMV is a very interesting space right now. there seems to be a revival stirring. take for example "at dead of night." its a horror game thats pre-rendered and uses FMV and does it perfectly to stunning effect. people liked it, markipliers lets play got something like 7M views IIRC. and the previous game by that same person was a full FMV murder mystery game and it is very compelling indeed. nobody has seen these concepts fleshed out in the modern world where storage is dirt cheap and video games are taken seriously. new life is going to be breathed into these concepts and i think it will be very exciting.
yitchelle|4 years ago
I was in an open plan office at the time of about 30 desks. Every single one of the machines had this screen saver running.
rezmason|4 years ago
http://rezmason.github.io/matrix
http://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?volumetric=true
Forks, pull requests and feedback welcome! :)
http://www.github.com/Rezmason/matrix
arthurcolle|4 years ago
I've tried all the new ones and haven't found any that seem half-decent. Anyone know of any advancements in this sector?
rezmason|4 years ago
skytreader|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
cblconfederate|4 years ago
omoikane|4 years ago
handrous|4 years ago
lelandbatey|4 years ago
Overall, the page is an ad for the new Matrix movies, a teaser for some upcoming trailer. It's a white screen showing a red pill on the left and a blue pill on the right. You click on one of the pills and a video starts streaming with a voice over, a-la one of Morpheus' speeches from the original. As you see the green "matrix digital rain" falling, you'll hear the same voice over per-pill each time, with both indicating something along the lines of "are you sure about what you know?" and right after that opening voice line the video will show the current time (very seamlessly, so it seems like it's always been a part of the video) and the actor doing the voice-over says the time right then.
In my case it was 10:59am when I played the video, so the overall effect was like this:
No matter which you click on you get effectively the same thing, but with a different script and voice per pill color.sangnoir|4 years ago
abdel_nasser|4 years ago
WorldMaker|4 years ago
dangus|4 years ago
leephillips|4 years ago
dotancohen|4 years ago
https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
aidenn0|4 years ago
TYPE_FASTER|4 years ago
remram|4 years ago
echelon|4 years ago
We're not far from emotive TTS + photo realistic rendering in a real time engine, potentially with neurally generated models to match real time events or camera input.
Matrix 5 will be this, but you'll be in the trailer, and it'll reference real world events. And that's just the start.
The future of audio and video is going to be crazy.
leephillips|4 years ago
yepthatsreality|4 years ago
me_me_me|4 years ago
Anyhow I have rewatched all 3 a month ago. I was surprised how good 3rd one actually is. Now I am of opinion that all 3 are good.
Don't know what it is, probably I watching it through the prism of philosophical questions, the free will and whatnot. And also lore of the world. There are many details and hints in dialogues that you might missed, but explain quite a bit.
That said, nobody asked for Matrix 4, self contained story + neo and trinity dead. I am very sceptical about it. Ill watch it only if reviews are ok.
bborud|4 years ago
kristiandupont|4 years ago
cblconfederate|4 years ago
asadlionpk|4 years ago
laulis|4 years ago
https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/_nuxt/videos/qu...
gregsadetsky|4 years ago
Did you download it by any chance?
worldmerge|4 years ago
[1]- https://imposium.com/
Their previous work: https://www.rga.com/work/case-studies/dupont-a-better-now
hansjorg|4 years ago
UI_at_80x24|4 years ago
Apocryphon|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
motohagiography|4 years ago
The idea that it is good to be unmoored from our senses and experiences in favour of filtering them through this flavour of intellectual dissociation seems unhealthy. When I think of the artists behind it, if you are invested in someone's happiness, "red-pilling" them is not generous or sharing, it's self interested and adding company to misery, and I am doubting that this is art by people actuated by the wellbeing of others.
Apocryphon|4 years ago
I think there's been both qualitative and quantitative changes to American pop culture. Today's audience is able to handle more sophisticated or just convoluted complex narrative structures than in the past. From comic book cinematic universes to Christopher Nolan's gimmicks, we've come along way from straightforward standalone popcorn films. Now even dumb action movies have to be not just a sequel but intertextual, living within a cohesive fictional space. Everyone knows what "canon" refers to and most know common tropes. (Speaking of R&M, that show seems to be an example of running out of tropes to the extent of burning itself out, imploding into bigger and more meaningless reveals.)
That's also because of quantity. We've simply got too much content, across both films but TV shows, games, tie-in novels, comic books, and other media. Merchandising has been huge since the original Star Wars, but now every franchise has a Wiki and dedicated scholars. It's a whole new level of meta. Maybe that's the only way we can handle the scale of content we are bombarded by; to try to fit them together into cohesive contexts.
I don't know what that means for us as a society or as a culture, but I do note that The Matrix, or at least its sequels, helped to accelerate this process. Back in 2003, the series had both the Animatrix animated shorts and the Enter the Matrix video game that added to the story depicted on-screen, even introducing key characters that movie-only viewers would be confused by (such as the Kid).
I would say that dense intertextuality and cross-media world-building, not so much the Gnostic question your reality themes (which are old hat now), is the current defining legacy of The Matrix.
evv555|4 years ago
-
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
imtringued|4 years ago
thinkingemote|4 years ago
The lesson therefore of Hollywood is don't believe the hype.
gubby|4 years ago
Laremere|4 years ago
11:10am https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...
11:12am https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...
Both videos are the full trailer, and still work after the minute is over.
coding123|4 years ago
bassman9000|4 years ago
xvector|4 years ago
mike_d|4 years ago
saltyfamiliar|4 years ago
I really hope this doesn't turn out to foreshadow the movie as a whole.
2Gkashmiri|4 years ago
prox|4 years ago
DonCopal|4 years ago
agmm|4 years ago
Tool: https://agmm.xyz/matrix
gil0mendes|4 years ago
There are a lot of more variations than these, but is enough for what it is
https://gist.github.com/gil0mendes/398550cba7c96cb291b76cc41...
etaioinshrdlu|4 years ago
karmelapple|4 years ago
lazlee|4 years ago
(Not to mention the simple fact that neither Wachowski has made anything good since the first Matrix.)
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2|4 years ago
3r8Oltr0ziouVDM|4 years ago
cblconfederate|4 years ago
Eriks|4 years ago
:)
shapefrog|4 years ago
Google is able to detect my time, why cant the matrix?
me_me_me|4 years ago
nynx|4 years ago
dylan604|4 years ago
Edit: I opened up the dev tools, and did not see the typical HLS style segments. I saw several MP4 files intro/outro/etc. They could still have the segments ready to go, serve up the intro to buy time for the server to ```ffmpeg -i time.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4``` type of thing before serving to you
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
s09dfhks|4 years ago
AUSNA-ZI|4 years ago
ranguna|4 years ago
I started the video very close to 9:02 but was still 9:01, when the time was displayed on the video, it was actually 9:02, so I'm guessing they don't displayed the time of when the video started, but instead they display the exact time it should be when the time is displayed.
If you could change the position, this would break the affect, I can't pause either.
mdoms|4 years ago
rspeele|4 years ago
cblconfederate|4 years ago
PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago
SketchySeaBeast|4 years ago
I'm not sure what was better 20 years ago in terms of mainstream movies. The two biggest films of the year were book adaptions, the next two were CGI cartoons for kids, and the last of the top five was a remake of a movie from the 60s.
crateless|4 years ago
Apocryphon|4 years ago
f1refly|4 years ago