I’ve been wanting to write a blog for a while, so a good place to start is explaining how VoD works here at MLG. I’ll try to keep it short. ☺

Let me give you a little diagram of the VoD Process. Say, it’s the championship match from MLG Meadowlands: Final Boss vs Classic – Ogre2’s POV(Point of View)

Championship Match played → Match(es) saved to memory card → Memory card is then catalogued with match info (eg. Memory Card S-A1 holds Final Boss vs Classic match with POVs: Ogre 2 and Walshy)→ Game recorded → Game cut → Game uploaded → Game officially added to the website through VoD(Video on Demand)

Now imagine that one match split into five separate games through a Best of five series. We now have to get all the other seven POV’s that were in the game. That’s 40 separate files right there. And that’s only for one round, the championship round. WB1 thru LB Finals, there are 13 rounds; 13 x 40 = 520 matches that have to get uploaded to the site. THEN, it’s not only two teams playing in some of those brackets. Up to 32 teams play in one bracket, making the total possible matches played up to 8,320!!! That’s 8,230 matches to record, cut and add to the website! And that doesn’t even count the other games that have to get added to VoD, whether it may be Gears of War, Rainbow Six Vegas: 2 or both.

Ideally, that’s how many matches will be added after each event but of course, there are some things that go wrong. We try to get all matches played during the championship bracket but sometimes, viewpoints can’t be found, some games weren’t saved to memory cards properly or a number of other things could have happened preventing some games from being gotten.

Who does all this work? It’s split down between me and J0kr. We are the ones who have to organize all the memory cards that we have into what game was played on which memory card and who played in that game. We then have to, starting from Finals, LBF and WBF, record all the games and viewpoints going backwards. This way, you get the more important matches to watch first. We then record the games, “cut” the games, which is us making it so the start of the game starts at the 15:00 countdown and ends when it says “Game over”. Then after we cut of bunch of games, we send it over to synide, who uploads it and when that’s done, we add the games uploaded to the site thru VoD..

So you see, a lot of work has to get done before you even see that one game where neighbor got sick snipe on ogre 2 from mid air. We try our hardest to get these games to you as fast as possible after each event. This year, it takes more to do since we’re not adding just one viewpoint playing five matches in one file but one viewpoint playing five matches through five separate files.

VoD will be getting a makeover soon, so it’ll be easier to navigate through all those matches. The way we have it now is outdated and hard to sort through and when you see the new way to navigate, you’ll like it a lot. Guaranteed.

Hopefully, you gained a little insight to what we do here in the MLG offices after events and appreciate all the hard work that goes into the VoD service.

And, we know a lot of people are having problems with some of the VoD on the website. The problem is being looked at and will hopefully be resolved soon.