Matrix trailer dynamically uses current time | Hacker News Reader

Matrix trailer dynamically uses current time

thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com

207 pointsseancoleman190 comments

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)

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:

    // change 1435 for any HHMM time
    timeStr = "red-a-b1-c1435-d-e2-f-g3-h2-i"
    videoFile = MD5("17" + timeStr) + ".mp4"
    url = "https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/high/" + videoFile

:-)

---

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...

Sadly my timezone wasn't set up correctly, apparently (I'll have to mess with hwclock, I guess.) Still a cool little teaser!

Hmm...each of these videos is rendering the same clips for me. The web player will render new ones though.

The clips are pretty much the same, except for when the time appears on the screen, which happens somewhere in the middle of the videos, no?

At least for me, for each of the videos in that gist the only difference between them was the timestamp at the beginning of the video. All the movie clips were the same. :/

Since I first replied to your comment, people have figured out that there's more than just the 'time' (that appears at 0:23 in the video) that changes from one video to another. There are 'parameters' that get encoded in the video file name/URL's MD5 hash as well. Compare these two videos:

Original video file name: blue-a-b1-c1234-d-e1-f-g1-h1-i

which is this url: https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...

Another video file name: blue-a-b3-c0555-d-e3-f-g3-h3-i

which is this url: https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...

Notice the differences due to the b, e, g and h values:

- at 0:13 the video is different

- at 0:18 the video is different

- at 0:23 the displayed time is different (12:34 versus 5:55)

- at 0:35 the video is different

- at 0:39 the video is different

- at 0:42 the video is different

---

This is also really helpful to see all of the clips :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeRmoU7VxIA

Found on https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/pjww65/whatismatrix...

b, e, g, h are all 1..3 ;)

https://gist.github.com/EriksRemess/62f946bda713da80c7905d1c...

Yeah, you’re totally right, and “red” can also be “blue” of course

I didn’t go into that but I should have mentioned it. There are also multiple resolutions for the videos…! It’s truly 1440 videos times all of the options…!

Have you have been able to decode what the b, e, g and h options mean?

Is there larger resolution than 1080p ?

Someone posted a trailer they found (that has since been removed) with “7000k” in the url, so… maybe?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448361

Having looked at it a bit more, I only see "low" and "high" mentioned as qualities. You can replace "high" with "low" in the list of URLs I included (see my gist, posted above) and they seem to work e.g.,

https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/lo...

There is an intriguing list in the source code though:

  ["4000k", "5000k", "6000k", "7000k", "8000k", "9000k", "12000k", "15000k"]

which ... could be a list of (pretty extreme) resolutions? Or are these color temperatures?

15k is getting very blue in terms of temperature. Maybe bitrates? Those would also fit.

You've been vindicated, it's definitely bitrate! :-)

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28464228

Looks like there are just two resolutions - "high" 1080p, "low" 720p

h = ["high", "low"]

b, e, g, h are random number from 1 to 3

Math.floor(Math.random() * 3) + 1

edit: b, e, g, h are different segments included. So all unique segments are in these videos:

blue-a-b1-c0000-d-e1-f-g1-h1-i 1f3dbdfd6a7c3d574b6b9eb8d07a3567.mp4

blue-a-b2-c0000-d-e2-f-g2-h2-i 241eb47071c89d8f18b0948763d6389a.mp4

blue-a-b3-c0000-d-e3-f-g3-h3-i 498ec3ba6719291e77b2a8870c744bdf.mp4

red-a-b1-c0000-d-e1-f-g1-h1-i ea2222b8b7a5c72396f76d65cf56890a.mp4

red-a-b2-c0000-d-e2-f-g2-h2-i bac726340f5486d9e02942c243e5b56b.mp4

red-a-b3-c0000-d-e3-f-g3-h3-i ce1aef26388b49562eab495b597e8fbc.mp4

Oh, so you’re saying that there are only 3 unique video segments, but you might get a 1..3 random number for all b, e, g and h arguments…?

So 1440 per-minute videos * 2 pill colors (red/blue) * 3^4 segments (1..3 values for each b, e, g, h argument) * 2 video qualities (high/low)!

3 different segments per key/argument, 4 keys/arguments, 2 colors = only 24 random segments inserted

Sorry do you mean that not all b, g, etc. argument values are possible?

So b1 g2 for example might be possible, but b2 g1 might not exist?

i.e. are values truly random / uniformly distributed?

any combination is possible but, e.g., all blue videos with g3 will have same g segment.

Makes sense, thanks!

Might these not have been cached?

Sorry, what do you mean? In a way, they are “cached” — by being pre-rendered files, all that the web server (s3/cloudfront, really) has to do is serve the file to the user…

Are you saying that the video files should have been cached, or..?

Thanks

I'm saying that these URL's:

https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/cb4754d123f0ea1eae26820...

May have be generated dynamically on the fly (probably programmatically editing / splicing the vids), but the developers, knowing that some people were going save the URLs, cache what's generated for a time so you can access it again without the expense of regen (also splicing in the different clips).

I'm just speculating though. It's part of what makes this promo really cool.

I'd love to see a breakdown. As promo sites go, it's very smart.

Ah, got it, thanks.

I don’t think that we have definitive proof that the video files are not being generated every time, but most evidence points to that. (There might be some metadata in the mp4 that could help resolve this more definitely)

Considering the complexity of doing on the fly video splicing (even if the results are cached) vs the ability for big studios like WB to do the splicing offline in a controlled environment that they’re used to, it’s probably safe-ish to assume everything was generated in advance.

It also definitely helps with QA - you can be more sure that the splicing worked if you can test some/any/all files before serving them via CloudFront vs relying on a complex-enough piece of tech.

A breakdown of the tech behind this from WB would be interesting to read for sure!

Cheers

I'm disappointed, would've been cool if it was done on the fly

Their static file approach makes sense.

There's "only" 1440 combinations and the site is going to get a lot more views than that so why bother re-rendering everything dynamically?

Technically you wouldn't have to re-render (i.e. recompress), you could just dynamically splice in different compressed audio frames. AAC (what MP4 uses) does this well, MP3 less so but for vast majority of listeners it's still indiscernible, especially if there's a slight audio gap. The CPU load is de minimis, though you do still need to track frames--can't just move blobs from disk to socket using sendfile(2). I did this for a radio streaming server that supported per-listener ads--everybody received the same content stream (or at least, one of several codec+format pipelines, i.e. RTP+AAC, FLV+MP3, etc), but when ad spots were detected they were dynamically swapped with different spots that varied per output stream. From the perspective of downstream software clients it was still always one long, unbroken encoded stream. I never got around to supporting compressed video frame splicing, but it would work the same way, modulo the fact that your key frames tend to be spaced out more so it wouldn't always be so seamless with ad hoc content (you'd definitely want a brief screen blackout or carefully placed key frames for the transition like you often see in broadcast television).

But while conceptually easy to do this, I've never seen other streaming servers do this, certainly not open source ones. And of course the most obvious, simplest way is to just pre-render a bunch of static files and serve using a dumb HTTP server.

Thanks that's what I was looking for!

Yes it does make sense. I just wished they did took the re-rendering approach so I could see how it can be done :)

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.

Ah yes, that makes sense. I do remember seeing in the code that they add … 23 seconds? I think to the current time. I imagine that the time is shown in the video at the 23 secs mark?

So yes you’re right, they do take that (minute changes while watching the video) into account!

I doubt they’re replacing the video at any point, it’s all probably prerendered videos for each time.

For a user who’s clock changes midplay, you would simply check the time with seconds before choosing the video to render, if it’s MM:35 or after you would play the MM+1 video instead of MM

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?

> When you’re dreaming, you often think you’re awake.

Is this the case, or is it just that when you're dreaming, you don't usually think to ask yourself whether you're dreaming or awake? (And when you do, you either become lucid or wake up?)

I spent some time trying to have lucid dreams. I distinctly remember times where the question didn't result in either. But instead a suspicious half lucid state. Where you are a lot more aware that something is wrong. But not quite sure you are actually dreaming.

One of the simplest methods was to look for a clock. Look away, and see if it changes. The realization of "hmm, I should find a clock" making them appear on every street light and building. Wasn't always the obvious indication of a dream it might sound like. Instead leading to a very confused dream wondering if reality always looked that way.

There was something in the Animatrix that still haunts me after having watched it when it came out (right after the first Matrix).

There is a scene where humans have jacked in to a machine using cables and there is some conversation which leads to the line “To a machine, every input is artificial.”

There’s nothing stopping more layers of simulations outside the ones we’ve seen already. (Except, of course: lack of mass market appeal)

At the time after reloaded came out, this was my favourite theory - that it's just another simulation - but they didn't take it into account which was a bummer.

Well, it was clear that the third part was rushed by the studio and just crammed with that awful and unwatchable Zion battle sequence with all the unnecessary side characters.

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.

Who had the Matrix screen saver back in the day?

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.

why not i mean it still looks cool

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?

I still have this: https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1189

Nice that the instruction to exit is in the step-by-step.

Does anyone mind if I peddle mine? Runs in the browser, lots of customizability:

http://rezmason.github.io/matrix

http://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?volumetric=true

Forks, pull requests and feedback welcome! :)

http://www.github.com/Rezmason/matrix

Nice work, I remember trying this a while back. Is there a way to increase the stream density on the volumetric version?

By the way on the videos in the original post, they look extremely similar to your volumetric one! I know yours predates it - maybe you inspired the volumetric design in the new trailers!

Thanks for expressing interest!

You can use the "density" URL variable to multiply the number of volumetric raindrops, like so:

https://rezmason.github.io/matrix/?volumetric=true&density=3...

The full list of parameters is in the README.md at:

https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix#readme

The similarities you point out are probably because of my recovery of the original font, which is also in the repo, and may soon need some expansion :D

I thought I remembered an issue on your repo where someone asked if there was a way to make it into a screensaver - am I misremembering, or was it removed? and out of curiosity - is that indeed possible or not? I scrolled through the README but maybe missed it. Thanks again!

https://github.com/cwc/web-page-screensaver

Something like this should do the trick.

You might be remembering my "WebSaver" project, which I mainly use for my own Macs.

https://github.com/Rezmason/websaver

Huh, new glyphs just dropped. Guess I've got some homework.

http://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/_nuxt/videos/tea...

This is fantastic, I was always intrigued if it would be possible to create a similar effect using actual code from Github rather than glyphs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I predict he’ll wind up expelling a sigh of relief.

No Hugo Weaving either it looked like.

Hopefully, his character Agent Smith is still in?

I don't think so, Neil Patrick Harris might be playing an equivalent role it seems like. The old storyline is done, this is now the present or near future or so it seems. Kind of alluding to "you don't need super tactical Agents, you can just give them a pill and a nice Chardonn... er.. cellphone and distract people into oblivion."

The progression of phone technology will be striking. By 1999 or 2003 standards the phones in the movies were cutting-edge chic. How would they do that to a future awash in branded touchscreen smartphones, I wonder.

"Take this if you want to live" Christina Ricci says as she hands Morpheus Jr. a holographic PinePhine running Arch and a neural uplink transceiver, tossing what looks like a earbuds case on the ground as it shimmers and transforms into a hoverbike speeder (branded PORSCHE for the requisite product placement just like in the first film). They speed off in search of Johnny Silverhands.

Agent Smith was destroyed in Matrix 3. It was a reasonably major part of the plot.

I recently realized that in an action movie the hero almost doesn't matter. The villain makes or breaks the movie. Luke Skywalker, John McClane, Neo: they're irrelevant next to Darth Vader, Hans Gruber, and Agent Smith.

Hugo Weaving was on fire as Agent Smith in The Matrix. One of the best performances I've ever seen. The interrogation room at the beginning, and the desperation with Morpheus at the end, are just pure perfection. This movie is going to suck unless they can figure out a new villain half as good as Agent Smith in Matrix 1.

I trust Neil Patrick Harris to be a compelling villain, but I'm not even sure he's the main villain.

The Matrix 4 must be the long awaited true sequel to Dr. Horrible.

Counterpoint is action movies where the conflict with the villain is not the primary conflict. e.g. True Lies; sure there's some terrorist stealing nuclear bombs, but that's not what the audience cares about.

True Lies is about a NSA agent using agency powers to spy on his wife, who's not even cheating on him (he just think she is). The bomb plot is just an excuse for the horse chase, and that horrible fighter jet at the end.

Hugo at least was in talks and read the script. It's just that scheduling conflicts didn't allow it.

>Hugo Weaving, who starred in the franchise as Agent Smith, was originally approached to reprise his role, but he had scheduling conflicts with his involvement in Tony Kushner's theatrical adaptation of The Visit, leading Wachowski to conclude that the dates would not work after staying in touch with Weaving for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_Resurrections

Fishburne wasn't even contacted.

Do you want me to translate this from Hollywood BS? Hugo probably thinks it’s a stinkerrrr.

That's definitely a possibility. Hugo said he read and wanted to be part of it despite some initial reticence about going back to the franchise again.¹ I guess we'll see. I'm surely not betting on being as good as the first.

¹https://www.gamespot.com/articles/matrix-4-hugo-weaving-spea...

I’ve heard an interview with the Dir. of Photography of Matrix 1/2/3 and he said the Wachowskis lost their way after 1, changed their entire way of dealing with actors (it shows) and he hated the experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t the only one.

Tbh my impression is there was some genius ghost writing done by one or multiple individuals on Matrix 1, which as per Hollywood rule, is never to be acknowledged (this happens all the time). The Wachowskis are now stuck in this weird loop of making films that are not as good as that one while having far more than enough opportunities to do it at this point.

I can only imagine the pitch to try and keep him in. "Get this, what if Agent Smith decided AGAIN not to get garbage collected?!"

I just watched the trailer, if you click the red pill it certainly sounds like his voice narrating. And his character is also portrayed.

https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...

That's not his voice, but whoever it is sounds similar. Same accent, similar voice but not as deep and with less variation in emphasis. I'm guessing whoever it is is playing Morpheus' son.

That sounds a lot like Yahya Abdul Mateen.

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.

They could still call him for some "pre recorded message we just found" or w/e.

I also find it quite rude since morpheus is arguably the most (after neo, of course) representative character of the franchise.

I don't know if that's a good excuse - Neo and Trinity both died in Revolutions but Keanu and Carrie-Ann Moss are back.

They're probably digital backups of uploaded memories or something like that. Both of their bodies were at the Machine City at the end of the trilogy, after all.

(Further Matrix Online spoilers) The main storyline of the bulk of the time that The Matrix Online was, uh, online was the resurrection of Neo (or "the retrieval of Neo from the Source" if you prefer that nomenclature). Morpheus sacrificed himself as a part of that effort.

From the stand point of "Morpheus sacrificed himself for Neo", that's a good story, even if very few players were around for the game event where that happened "on screen". I think its a pretty decent excuse for "Morpheus isn't involved in Matrix 4" even if I do hope that they find a way somehow to tell that story in a better way than "well if you look for the right YouTuber you might get an okay retelling of what playing The Matrix Online was like" and/or compilations of the live events cutscenes. (Related aside: Owning what was once the developer Monolith, Warnermedia should own all of the assets of The Matrix Online, except maybe remaining clauses in publishing contracts with Sega/Sony/what is today Daybreak. I wonder if some sort of F2P revival might have been an interesting marketing plan for Matrix 4.)

I don't have any direct theories on Trinity's return. There's rumors about where Matrix Online's storyline was supposed to go before the game was shutdown, of course, but rumors of a storyline and events that didn't even happen are certainly non-canon. I am of course very curious to see how they address it.

If Matrix Online had an important part of the plot then Matrix 4 would include that story to catch everyone up.

I agree, but also the Wachowskis put important parts of the plot of Matrix 2 and 3 in the Animatrix animated anthology and also the videogame Enter the Matrix so this wouldn't be the first time for the franchise.

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.

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.

What does the state of the art look like? I'm not following closely enough to know, I only get an update when something leaks into the meme-o-sphere, like the recent "World Leaders singing Numa Numa:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8CKlTlQA64

Here's my stupid text to speech website:

https://vo.codes

And you can try the alpha of "version 2" by visiting this, which has improvements in synthesis and vocoder quality, and also lets people contribute:

https://api.vo.codes/enable

This is far from state of the art, but you can see at the other end of the spectrum that it's an easy toy that anybody can use.

I'm working on a photo -> 3D rigged model system and model style transfer. You can follow me on Twitch or Twitter to see that when it's ready.

Very cool! This is fun and I can see big improvements from v1 to v2. I look forward to watching this evolve!

https://vo.codes/tts/result/TR:s1rj02g34ppc7bhq1m8bf6p3thny6

Thanks!!

A few areas for improvement in the clip you posted:

I need to add better duration estimation. It's unfortunately truncated.

A lot of the community-trained voices don't fully leverage phonetic annotation, so some of the words fall flat.

I think the synthesizer has too much noise in it (you can see this in the image). The person who trained it probably used noisy data.

Finally, the universal vocoder isn't handling James Earl Jones' deep voice very well. It should be fine tuned.

The future of audo and video is deepfakes for everything. Won’t be able to trust any video evidence anymore — except if watermarked by a trusted signatory.

I wouldn't even trust a watermark. It'd have to be a cryptographic signiture on the file itself.

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.

Why is this called Matrix 4 when there is only one Matrix movie?

haha indeed!

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 agree to the extent that the Architect in Matrix 2 [?] had some interesting things to say, and his explanation about why the machine needed humans almost redeemed the idiotic rationale of the first movie (electrical generators???). But, that and few other interesting ideas aside, I found them tedious and not well constructed.

I read on here a long time ago that it wasn't just supposed to be humans as batteries, but as CPUs/algorithms (some good further discussion too, about the Architect): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832

I thought I'd seen an earlier discussion on a mailing list or something but can't find it now.

I remember coming up with an idea, which I thought was original, of us being in a simulation where all our life choices are just training an AI advertising engine that then targets "real" humans, and then later came across this revelation about The Matrix, and of course it'd already been thought of.

Still a promising idea, though.

Apparently the original plot was that humans were used for compute, which would make more sense, but the studio didn't think audiences would understand that as well.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

Humans used for compute is also central to the Hyperion Cantos, IIRC.

Is that right? All I can remember is the Shrike. Terrifying.

I’m going to assume they meant compute from now on as the body heat thing is too annoying

I think they were too cryptic and the Wachowskis were consumed by the grandiosity of their own mythos, but they were still impressive for what they attempted to do: build a sci-fi epic.

I think it would help if Reloaded and Revolutions are viewed as one film; maybe chop off a few parts here and there too.

Reloaded, the cerebral philosophical expository arc. And then Revolutions, just guns and fists a-blazin'.

This is why the Animatrix is great. It's divided into 9 episodes across various points in the timeline. Each episode was created by a different group, so you get 9 perspectives on the overall story.

having re-watched the original recently, one of the most striking things was how successfully they managed to create a setting that excuses practically every single convention of bad screenwriting and still works as a film.

I'd read an article about what those conventions were.

well for one, superman trope.

Neo is a 'god' in the matrix and yet movie avoids 'I'll just punch everyone, so why bother doing something clever'.

The scenes with key-maker escaping are really tense, and neo was cleverly outsmarted to be removed from the chase.

I say there are 2 good matrix movies what we got though was one good one and 2 mediocre ones. 2 and 3 were really one story, but it needed a serious amount of editing. There was a lot of fluff in there that really detracted from the story. They could have released that movie and then special editioned it for DVD release... The last 2 also suffered from a problem once you make someone superman. The stakes are just not there. They tried to make that with zion. But story wise they just did not make the audience really care about them. The first one you felt like you were right there along for the ride. 2 and 3 you were merely an observer and did not feel terribly invested. They are 'ok' movies but just do not go into them expecting more of matrix 1.

Has anyone done a fan-edit of the last two films into a single, tighter version?

It worked really well taking the Hobbit trilogy down to a single watchable movie.

No, 2 & 3 weren't good. The original Matrix set up a story about getting people on the Matrix. The film was successful and they probably realized that was unworkable. So they shifted to whatever philosophical mumbo jumbo they had. I actually majored in philosophy, so I'm not against philosophy for the record.

I wouldn't consider myself part of the lower denominator of action movie fans. I like a wide range of movies and I look for positive things in even the worst movies. I am generally along for the ride no matter the premise or film quality or even acting depending on the situation. I just like stories.

The last two movies just aren't that great. They aren't terrible, but they leave a lot to be desired. The second movie is fine, it gives us a lot of cool ideas, but the pacing is a bit off. It tries hard to manage being a cool sci-fi movie all about the concepts and an action movie. They just don't nail the balance, but it's not a complete miss as a blockbuster movie.

The third movie is where things really fall off. Everything setup in the second movie is ruined with this movie. They are balancing too many things; The Matrix world and the real world all with multiple subplots, and the concepts with the characters and action. They try to force in new characters that don't have any time to really develop, so we don't really care. And the last fight scene is just a bit dumb and the CGI is pretty bad. It's really just a lazy ending and fan pandering trying to capture the fight scene from the first movie. And because this is tying up the stuff we get in the second movie, it just makes all the cool stuff of that one sort of lackluster.

I won't flame you for liking all three, that's the joy of art. But I think people also have reasonable criticisms of the trilogy overall.

I haven't played it since (and I know it's generally considered Not Very Good) but I remember greatly enjoying the Enter The Matrix video game, largely because the concept of tying the plot of the game into Reloaded directly was such a cool idea. it wasn't just your typical video-game-of-the-movie, instead it follows the story of two minor characters from the films that runs parallel to the second film. it's kind of a bummer that basically nobody else used this idea for anything else.

This was super groundbreaking it was wild. Also Animatrix - set of animated short movies each discribing some part of the world. Super nice pack.

At the least animatrix was as good as the original Matrix movie.

The truth is there is no movie

The Matrix is really just a side-story for Dark City.

...and it should have ended there. Every sequel just detracts from the whole.

I guess it's slightly more honest than the way they keep trying to make Terminator 3... :-)

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.

Found a teaser (possibly testing one?) with WB Marketing watermarks:

https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/_nuxt/videos/qu...

Good find! Unfortunately, the file has since disappeared..!

Did you download it by any chance?

https://web.archive.org/web/20210907191313/https://thechoice...

Wow, good one. Thank you!

Few interesting things about that file:

- that video has a higher bitrate -- ffprobe shows 4338 kb/s, which is probably an average value. One of the "regular" MD5-named videos I tried has 2256 kb/s as its bitrate

- the resolution of the file is the same as the regular MD5-encoded filename videos i.e. 1080p

- as the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448361 comment mentions, it does have WB watermarks

- the Internet Archive grabbed 4 similarly non-MD5-named videos in total:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://thechoiceisyours.whati...

(I can't link to the list of files directly because the asterisk in the URL breaks HN formatting -- follow the "Click here to search for all archived pages under" link)

- The 7000k/12000k values in those URLs do correspond to bitrate. The 12000k video (downloadable from the archive.org link above) has an average bitrate of 6131 kb/s. It also has watermarks.

R/GA owns a company, Imposium[1], that does dynamic video. Wonder it they did this.

[1]- https://imposium.com/

Their previous work: https://www.rga.com/work/case-studies/dupont-a-better-now

It's 07:45 PM? Oh, that's 19:45, cool. Kind of breaks the effect a bit for those of used to a 24 hour clock.

Yeah I had the same reaction. A computer would never make that kind of mistake! Somebody yell at the Squid sysadmin to kick the locale again.

Trailer should've used epoch.

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.

> Don't forget Loki, or WandaVision for that matter.

> ... convoluted complex narrative structures than in the past.

You've got to be kidding...

Mass market pop culture in the past wouldn't place the focus on plot elements like multiple dimensions, alternate timelines, elaborate nostalgic homages to different genres of television, stuff like that. The more high concept sci-fi or fantasy might, but not something as basic as a superhero television show. It goes to show that even mass appeal entertainment are now experimenting with nonlinear storytelling.

Back to The Future is not mass pop culture?

NVM, I looked it up for you: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1985/

BtTF was a standalone movie, then a trilogy with only two sequels, not either 1) a multimedia franchise like many of the works I've mentioned or 2) an Inception or Tenet type Nolan blockbuster that requires infographics to tease out the plot.

> a multimedia franchise like many of the works I've mentioned

I guess you forgot about the animated series.

Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...

Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.

In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.

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”

Wait for it to come out. If current movies are anything to go by, expect your expectations to be subverted.

The lesson therefore of Hollywood is don't believe the hype.

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.

1440*2 different pre-rendered videos I assume.

You can't pause it, so could be.

Probably recorded him saying 1 through 59 and o'clock and am or pm and then for looped it.

Well, 0 ("oh") to 13, the suffix "teen" and prefixes "twenty", "thirty", "forty", "fifty" are enough...

There's a story about the lady who recorded Siri's voice, the engineers figured out what noises she had to make to cover all syllables. Considering Siri also speaks several languages...

Seems so, looking at network traffic,

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.

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.

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.

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 suppose - I personally would love the subtle, artsy approach of having it as a 'hidden' detail, but yeah, it wouldn't be as 'cool' I guess.

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 don't understand how this is different to what the above person said.

That’s how you know you are in the Matrix. Recursive looping sometimes happens besides our best effort to prevent it.

If you have enough space, that is. One trailer is around 13MB and there are 1440 of them so that is 18GB for all of them.

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.

Tool: https://agmm.xyz/matrix

I just created a straightforward node script to generate the video URL given the time and the pill color.

There are a lot of more variations than these, but is enough for what it is

https://gist.github.com/gil0mendes/398550cba7c96cb291b76cc41...

How did it just do full screen on iOS?

A Quicktime movie plays

Huge Matrix fan but ... gah ... this is not something I want. Spin offs, sure, but another Neo story? Nope. Don't care.

(Not to mention the simple fact that neither Wachowski has made anything good since the first Matrix.)

Does it use the click on the pill as intent to then maximise the video (iOS safari experience)

Doesn't work for me because my time zone is spoofed :)

You believe you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you

Nice code word/project name for this site wb-ice-cream-site

I am wondering why it thinks it is 8:24am when my computer says it is 9:24am ...

Google is able to detect my time, why cant the matrix?

Its a ploy of matrix to keep you convinced it doesnt exist.

That matrix is a sly one, I guess it was the real redpill answer. Made me seriously doubt the nature of reality, time and space.

I was genuinely curious as to which time field it was picking up in my browser - I suspect it is ignoring daylight savings time offset? Got downvotes instead so wtf would I know!

Huh, I wonder how they did that.

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

Not that many chunks, looks like the entire video is re-generated.

My browser fetched

https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...

which is for 1:54.

I'd bet all the marbles that they're "JIT" rendering the full video upon request. Intro + hour chunk (12 options) + minute chunk (59 options, skipped if minute is 0?) + am-pm chunk (2 options) + Outro. If you open the page in two different browsers at the same time and chose the same pill color, the resulting video file URL is different; this suggests to me that they're not caching the compilation results for the next client.

I would have strong doubts that they are rendering them each time. I would put all my marbles that they have each one pre-rendered 1 time, and then paid Keanu to sit in a booth and count from 0 to 59

Here's mine from 12:57 to confirm your hypothesis.

https://thechoiceisyours.whatisthematrix.com/generated/v7/hi...

Neat

When I change the position of the video, it resets and brings me back to the pills (RWD or FF)

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.

This is about the least clever way you could possibly imagine to use the time of day in a trailer.

It had almost as much finesse and imagination as "HOT SINGLES IN $YOUR_AREA".

this is barely interesting. It better be worth it or movies will be officially finished for me. feels like we re in a 20 year cultural swamp.

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.

No way, you can find all sorts of types of each of those things if you look past the mainstream.

Oh, the claim is not that there are all sort of types of each of these things.

It's that there hasn't been:

1. anything new since sometime in the 1990s

2. any dominant form in any of them since the 1990s

The usual angle is something like: consider hairstyles. Find pictures of popular hairstyles from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and so forth, and they will be highly correlated with the decade they were popular in. Now look at hairstyles from the 90s, the aughts, the tens: you will have no idea idea when the hairstyle was popular, because ... it wasn't. In fashion these days, "anything goes", and the same applies to all these other things. At least, that's the claim of this view.

I'm not 100% certain I agree with it, but it does seem to contain a kernel of truth.

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?

Let's move past the fact that he came to the party late and celebrate the fact that he showed up at all.

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Also relevant:

https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2001/08/28

Everyone has their pet film and it so happens that the first Matrix movie is mine. Anyway, I stopped watching movies over a decade ago and i can't pinpoint the precise straw that did the trick.

Maybe it was the million other straws underneath it.

Not only the state of Hollywood but also the Wachowskies who should not be given money anymore as they have proven again and again.

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