Uncyclopedia:Wizard Request

Uncyclopedia:RFW (Requests for Wizards)

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If you have something specialized that needs doing, scroll down, you're quite likely in the right place.

Whoops! Maybe you were looking for UN:REQ, or UN:PIC? How about UN:AUDIO?

For a list of useful MediaWiki-defying workarounds already in place, see Uncyclopedia:Hacks.

For a tedious enumeration of useless templates, see our site's wide selection of existing Templates.

If you have a generalized query of an immediate nature, see Forum:Help.

If on the other hand you are experiencing delusions of a persistent nature (sitewide problems/serious issues), see Report A Problem.

If none of these options interest you, a good place to seek out other pages like this is the Help Portal, conveniently located at UN:HELP.

What Belongs Here

If You Need Something Special... “ A wizard did it. ” Need a little something special? Down in the formatting doldrums? Can't do those sound bytes by yourself anymore? Pesky template just won't get it up? Can't figure out where to put your thing? Don't be ashamed. According to a recent study taken nationwide, 4 out of five Americans and 10 out of ten dentists have required the services of a "wizard", "expert", "fixer", "trained professional", or "licensed, insured and bonded contractor" at some point in their lives. The first step to recovery is admitting you need help. From a wizard.

The idea of this page is to gather all of the finest expert minds on Uncyclopedia to assist users with their more outlandish creative needs: custom templates, unusual page formatting for unusual pages, music requests, custom userboxes, innovative formatting ideas, irregular voice work, and anything specialized that needs doing.

In other words, this is the page you can request help from Uncyclopedia veterans of various specialties. Whether you're a new user who would like help designing a snazzy new signature for signing your votes or a veteran writer in search of advanced formatting expertise to make your page that much more awesome, this is the place you're looking for.

A better rule of thumb is this: If your request simply doesn't make sense anywhere else, it probably belongs here.

Notes

Check out this massive collection of helpful links!

Archived RFWs:

Note: This is Request For Wizards. They rarely choose to come out of their lairs, so please be polite, or be tokenized!

REQUESTS GO HERE

Audio Request

I'd like to request an audio from someone who has:

1. A microphone that they use to do their audios with
2. A Casio keyboard or some other musical implement/program that comes packaged with preprogrammed beats, melodies, etc.

Both will be used to make a recording of wesley willis, in the style of the musician himself. If you're not familiar with him, please listen to a few of his songs beforehand to get the style down. Feel free to insert lengthy and illogical solos in between verses. -- T​K​F​​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​CK 04:51, August 18, 2010 (UTC)

This may not be a huge help, but have you thought of grabbing an old-school midi music maker and using that in place of your casio? Can probably generate that same kind of dodgy digital sound without having to have a piece of clunky equipment that won't work directly with your soundcard. Just a thought.                                • Puppy's talk page • 00:40, June 5, 2009 Saturday, 04:20, Aug 21 2010 UTC

Like I said, anything that might replicate or closely approximate the sound works. -- T​K​F​​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​U​CK 07:49, August 21, 2010 (UTC)

Hosting video

Have done another video unfomercial that I am getting back to fine tuning in order to add to Uncyc. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of a better way to host it on site at all? 

Also been thinking about audio as an auto-load when page comes up. Might be more appropriate for something like untunes. There is no option for auto-load of multimedia beyond flash incorporated stuff, but flash is not a strength of mine. If anyone has any ideas throw them my way.                               • Puppy's talk page • 00:40, June 5, 2009 Saturday, 04:20, Aug 21 2010 UTC

You could upload it as an ogg file. It's the only file format I know of that combines sound and animation without having to be watched in a separate media player. At Inciclopedia they can upload YouTube videos to the site, but we don't have that option here for some reason. —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 22:30, 21 August 2010

Up until fairly recently, it was primarily external host and embed, or bust. That of course changed with Wikipedia's controversial backing of HTML 5 contender Ogg Theora, which thanks to the legacy of Ogg Vorbis audio and the fact that as according to Special:Version, Uncyclopedia installed the OggHandler PHP wiki extension, would allow you to transcode to ogg video codec and put it in an ogg container and upload it here. There are many ways to do this, but mostly involve add-ons to established transcoders. The media conversion sites that claim to do it don't do it uniformly, and my brief survey of options in the last two hours strongly prefers using a Firefox extension called Firefogg to do the conversion, which works seemingly poorly for all converters from proprietary formats like WMV. Convert your video to avi first, use this extension, and you should get usable video that you can upload to Uncyclopedia. Using a web converter to snatch it to .avi and do this same thing, I successfully moved this video to Uncyc's server, one that should be very familiar to you...

As you can probably guess, there are some problems. Theora isn't a name that the internet public is terribly familiar with. There's good reason for that: it's an open source format that a group of evangelists are trying to make the entire web adopt. To even view the video, you have to employ one of these solutions already in your browser, which cuts out a fair portion of the market share of visitors at the outset:

• Your browser is Firefox 3.5 or above. You're set! Support is native and fairly good.
• You have a really recent build of Google Chrome.
• You have Java, and its bundled extension Cortado, which appears to work pretty shit. Unfortunately, since it's currently the most likely, OggHandler seems to prefer it and be annoying about that (extra clicks for the user to ask for one that works might make them think it's broken)
• You have any number of special browser plugins. VLC offers one. 
• You have Apple QuickTime plugged in to your browser, and have tracked down the relevant open-source build of a XiphQt plugin.

Now, if you can see this at all, perhaps you're like me, who can see a really small video in a really big dark gray transparent viewing window stretched vertically. This isn't presumably any problem of my conversions: if you go directly to the file, your browser will show it fairly big and acceptable quality, like Youtube did. I suppose this is some sort of formatting switch at some level that experience (or asking the author of the extension) will overcome. We'll need to do some research into its advanced parameters (autoplay, sizing, so forth...)

Anyway, rejoice! Uncyclopedia has VIDEO!!!
Kind of. --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 05:12, August 22, 2010 (UTC)

For some reason, the height parameter doesn't attempt to resize the video so much as the frame. It doesn't exhibit this behaviour on WP.

It takes a while to load because it's not optimized. Another one with the same problem... It should be noted we're not at the same version of the extension as Wikipedia, so that could explain it. I suppose it could have something to do with the bitrates. Or maybe there's just some secret transcoding club I'm not a member of. --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 08:54, August 22, 2010 (UTC) Checked Wikia Help. They've uploaded their own .ogg videos (although they've hidden them well) and they have the same issue. So perhaps this is one of those issues they'd like to fix for everybody instead of somebody here figuring out a cheesy workaround. I really do think it has something to do with the build the Wikia wikis have vs. Wikipedia... Does the sizing work like it should in anyone else's browser? --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 09:27, August 22, 2010 (UTC)

Using Opera lite at the present and my home pc is having connectivity issues, but managed to play with it enough to come to a conclusion. Ogg will work with some browsers and not others, and from what I could see is an ass to load - although as you said this may be a compilation issue. Flv is more what I had in mind at the moment, and have seen some videos hosted offsite but visible here - and will go back and have another look at them at some stage. Ogg is much like my excitement at animated svg - fantastic, but has very limited browser support. I've only managed to drag myself away from gif to png for transparent images due to issues with browser support. Also I would rather have play on load as opposed to play on click. I've faked video with animated gif as anyone who has looked at the opening screens of Game:Alone in the dark knows, but all without sound. Mp4 and avi are good friends, but non-uploadable to uncyc, and flv/swf is just the next step in my self edumacation. I will do a few ogg type things to get the ball rolling on that - nothing kills changes in tech as lack of developers using it, otherwise who the hell would use msie - but I might focus on offsite flv for the moment until I can do otherwise.                                • Puppy's talk page • 00:40, June 5, 2009 Sunday, 11:37, Aug 22 2010 UTC

The quality's been decimated a bit, enough where it loads much faster for me. While I was trying to stick to stuff we can do currently, perhaps it's time someone with the appropriate permissions goes "shopping" for Uncyc. The only thing that prevents anyone from uploading any file extension is a single line of code somewhere, in the form of something like:

  $wgFileExtensions[] = 'flv'; A quick check of mw:Category:Video_player_extensions reveals a variety of options. We'd probably install flvhandler for the uploads themselves and from there it's a matter of choosing whichever player is the best for us. mw:Extension:FLVPlayerTwo supposedly boasts an autoplay feature while mw:Extension:MediawikiPlayer apparently handles a wider variety of formats mw:Extension:QuickTime looks to be the solution for inline .mov files. But I'm not even sure who has the user rights to do this sort of thing, and how we'd go about finding them. Also, many many many kudos for making a point and click out of animated GIF's! --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 19:05, August 22, 2010 (UTC)

If my sources are correct then Sannse is our go to for those enhancements.                                • Puppy's talk page • 00:40, June 5, 2009 Sunday, 22:41, Aug 22 2010 UTC

Calling all gamers

Because I'm not one. Looking for a fps level editor that I can use to create images of 3d interior environments. Something like COD level editor but able to be downloaded at no cost and flexible in relationship to customisability. Don't necessarily want to create a playable environment as such. A user friendly interface would be good as well. I have blender but struggle to come to terms with the interface, even though I do admire the flexibility of it. Any ideas?                                • Puppy's talk page • 00:40, June 5, 2009 Saturday, 01:52, Dec 4 2010 UTC