Introducing The Smega-Drive Features Posted by Jonathan Capps on 19th November 2021, 10:00 A few years ago an enthusiastic young fan of the site called Seb Patrick laid a challenge at our door. “Why”, he scoused, “doesn’t Red Dwarf have a meme generator website similar to the brilliant Frinkiac and Morbotron?”. That was definitely exactly what he said. And, I’m sad to say, we immediately dismissed the idea as essentially impossible. The thought of the logistics of the image processing, the indexing, the matching up with subtitles and the website build itself made us feel immensely sleepy. But, as the old quote goes… we may not be fast but we get there in the end. So, 1,625,543 frames and 32,498 subtitles have been smashed together into what might be the most important website on the entire Internet and we are now incredibly proud to present to you, and the world… The Smega-Drive Want to know more? Then read on. So, it works like this. We’ve based the indexing and the search system on the subtitles from the DVDs / Blu-Rays, so you can search for a quote (or a small part of a quote) and with any luck you will find the subtitle screen you need, along with previews of frames that that subtitle covers. Select one of the frames to enter its ‘Meme Lab’, where in you can either edit the caption and download your meme, select a more suitable frame from the timeline, or use the arrow buttons to refine the timeline and convert it into an animated GIF. In addition to the subtitle search there are two random buttons, of which we strongly encourage the use. It’s worth pointing out at this point that the refinement of this system is an ongoing process. For example, the subtitles themselves contain some abridgements (not to the mention the genuinely shameful state of the subtitles for the later series. God help you if you actually need them to enjoy the episode) and the process we’ve used to extract them also comes with some errors, so we’re currently manually combing through these until they are complete and pristine, at which point we’ll probably put up the completed subtitle files for download. We’ll also be building on and improving the search system to help you find the scenes you need as easily as possible, as it is a tad on the crude side at the moment. If all else fails, then you can click on an episode title to view all of its subtitles, or use the episode browser link in the footer. So, go forth and meme! Give us a shout at smegadrive@ganymede.tv if you spot any bugs or particularly egregious subtitle errors, or if you just have any general feedback for us to improve the system in the future. While you’re at it, giving @RedDwarfShuffle on Twitter a follow will almost certainly enrich your day.
What a bloody undertaking. Not that long ago I spent about 20mins creating a gig of the “oh my god its hideous” from Ouroborus just so I could use it to reply to a tweet which I’m sure by that point the tweeter had forgetten they’d tweeted. We need more world ending apolocalypses as apparently you guys are extremely productive at the end of humanity. Well done!
The thought of doing this makes my brain hurt. Well done for powering through that and producing something fantastic.
Oh my goodness, this is amazing! “Frinkiac but for Red Dwarf” is a dream tool for this community, especially since the recent addition of the more user friendly image upload feature to the forum, but I never even suspected it would actually get made. Bravo! Honestly considering the font choice and the 2 different Random buttons being in there, this might be better than Frinkiac already. (Frinkiac’s font makes sense, but the Simpsons title font is too stylised to look good as captions in my view). Plus I’ve got to applaud the logo. It wasn’t necessary to do that just to provide the functionality, but I’m glad you did because it looks excellent.
Oh, if it helps, Random just brought me to a subtitle error. From the Mexican standoff scene in Can of Worms: -I’m not a polymorph. -Neither am 1.
https://smegadrive.ganymede.tv/frame/735145/VGhpcyB3aWxsIHNvbHZlIGFsbCBvdXIgbWVtZSBzdXBwbHkgcHJvYmxlbXMuIA../28/normal/bottom
Oh, if it helps, Random just brought me to a subtitle error. From the Mexican standoff scene in Can of Worms: -I’m not a polymorph. -Neither am 1. So, there will be a few of those scattered around until I manually go in and edit those. The OCR algorithm I was using struggles differenciating uppercase ‘i’ and lowercase ‘L’
So, there will be a few of those scattered around until I manually go in and edit those. The OCR algorithm I was using struggles differenciating uppercase ‘i’ and lowercase ‘L’ OK, makes sense, thanks Danny. I wasn’t surprised as the post said to expect subtitle mistakes here and there. I just wasn’t sure if it would help to report any errors I randomly find or not.
OK, makes sense, thanks Danny. I wasn’t surprised as the post said to expect subtitle mistakes here and there. I just wasn’t sure if it would help to report any errors I randomly find or not. I think if you see ay that are totally broken then give us a shout, but OCR errors will be gradually sorted out bit by bit. I am very, very pleased that people are enjoying this.
“Well, thankfully Holly’s unaffected” had a lowercase “well” when I got to it. “My foot says get the person who did this.” is definitely not the entire line, unless that was somehow my fault.
Should we make a forum thread to report these mistakes? I feel like every single line I go to is wrong in some way.
I never would have thought that pairing up random Red Dwarf frames with random Red Dwarf captions would work so well, but it just does.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here.
Should we make a forum thread to report these mistakes? I feel like every single line I go to is wrong in some way. Subtitles starting with a lowercase letter will be because that’s how they appear on screen as they’re often following on from the one before. You’re currently going to spot a load that don’t have the complete line as they’re still basically as they were on the DVDs so we know we need to go through every single one and fill them out and correct them. We just didn’t want to wait until that was done before launching…
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. Use the “img” HTML tag with the URL for the image as the value for the src attribute.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. img src=“http://minki.com/jog.jpg” with the triangle brackets around it.
I’m going to add an easy way to copy a ‘G&T friendly’ tag that when pasted into a comment or forum reply it’ll automatically grab your image. Due to the way that gifs work they need to be downloaded to your machine first, unfortunately.
How the hell do you even share images on these comments nowadays? The forum doesn’t have the tags listed anymore and I can’t copy+paste an image from a forum post over here. For me, the reply field for forum threads has the full control panel with formatting and image tags etc., but the reply field for any thread attached to a frontpage article doesn’t. Not sure why that is or if they can be toggled on and off.
I don’t think I could top this with another hour of slapping the dice button. Edit: This is pretty good though.
“Well, thankfully Holly’s unaffected” had a lowercase “well” when I got to it. “My foot says get the person who did this.” is definitely not the entire line, unless that was somehow my fault. So, you have to remember that the subtitles are somewhat summarised for read speed and clarity. This has the side effect of lines you’re familiar with sounding slightly off. Only ‘The End’ thus far have I actually gone through and corrected the lines to what is said on screen and as time goes on. What I might do is start a thread when the first series is done and then keep the thread updated with which series’ have supposed to have been fixed, then you guys know only to report anything which should have already been done. Sound good?
There is always the option to type in the exact quote if you’re that bothered about absolute accuracy, surely.
There is always the option to type in the exact quote if you’re that bothered about absolute accuracy, surely. Totally. Perfecting the captions will be excellent in the long term for making the search maximally useful, and for giving us confidence that the quotes are accurate without needing to verify them, but in the short term the current captions still work great. Releasing/unveiling it now was definitely the right call.
Only ‘The End’ thus far have I actually gone through and corrected the lines to what is said on screen and as time goes on. What I might do is start a thread when the first series is done and then keep the thread updated with which series’ have supposed to have been fixed, then you guys know only to report anything which should have already been done. Sound good? That makes way more sense. Just watch for random question marks where apostrophes are supposed to be. Totally. Perfecting the captions will be excellent in the long term for making the search maximally useful, and for giving us confidence that the quotes are accurate without needing to verify them, but in the short term the current captions still work great. Releasing/unveiling it now was definitely the right call. I absolutely agree, but I thought it was worth pointing out broken captions where I found them.
New question: where should we all be putting the hyphen-line break-hyphen when we’re making our dank cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixydixydoxydexydroxide memes? Me, I’m a fan of after the “libidium” part and before the “rixydixy” part. It just feels right.
New question: where should we all be putting the hyphen-line break-hyphen when we’re making our dank cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixydixydoxydexydroxide memes? Goddammit, I _still_ know this word by heart and can say it without skipping a beat. I don’t WANT to be this good at quoting Series 8. These are getting scary like honestly.
Well this is just fantastic work. Well done everyone! I never realized until today how often Rimmer says the word “gentlemen” – quite the eye opener I can tell you
Annoying the forum editor and the comments editor are separate things. I’ll see about how I can unify them but at some point tomorrow I’ll had a tag you can copy into a comment or forum and it’ll automatically pull in the image.
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!”
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!” It’s all in there, I think. https://smegadrive.ganymede.tv/memelab/763887 You just can’t get to it directly from a search or the episode index. You have to find the closest caption, then navigate forward or back along the timeline.
One thing I noticed that might be a problem is that some scenes aren’t included, presumably due to their lack of dialogue? For example, there aren’t any images of Lister kissing the psiren, just the build-up to it with Pete Tranter’s sister and then it cuts to Kryten saying “Come on, Dave, let’s get out of here!” Yep, very fair. It’s not made very clear but the timeline will let you scroll forwards or back and select a still from a scene with no dialogue. In the future we’re going to include dialogueless frames in the big episode indexes so you’ve always got that to fall back on, too.
You’ll notice some quick links in the Meme Lab now. You can use the G&T one to just paste into a comment or forum thread and it’ll pull in your image. There’s also a quick reference for HTML and a direct link to the image, too.
You’ll notice some quick links in the Meme Lab now. You can use the G&T one to just paste into a comment or forum thread and it’ll pull in your image. There’s also a quick reference for HTML and a direct link to the image, too.
I feel like there’s a game in the Smega-Drive. Quote and a still from the shuffle button, point for identifying the episode of each, could be made more difficult by deviously crafting ones of similar lines (my brain won’t come up with an example right now but I’m sure there are some) or similar stills from different episodes within a series. Maybe timed, like the G&T crossword.
This is amazing! Haven’t worked out how to do gifs from it yet but the the images are fun! Thanks guys for doing it, and for committing to keep improving it :D Oh actually, this is a weird one But the text in the box says – What are you doing with that butt�H�[�IݙH[X�\��\��YYH��� It’s from the dice so I’ve no idea what the line is supposed to be not where it’s come from. – That stupid soap opera? Why�H�X�]\�HH�[��ܙ�]I�HYK
Yeah, I noticed a few this morning. In the meantime, I’ve constructed a little love story between Rimmer and Kochanski, and it’s absolutely knocked me sick:
Yeah I think a change I made yesterday has done something daft with some of the subtitles. I’ll have a look at it.
Oh actually, this is a weird one But the text in the box says – What are you doing with that butt�H�[�IݙH[X�\��\��YYH��� It’s from the dice so I’ve no idea what the line is supposed to be not where it’s come from. Ah ha, I just had this happen to me too. Weird that it only seems to garble the caption when randomising. Looking up the non-broken part of the quote afterwards – from Confidence & Paranoia and Kryten in your case, Camille in mine – the actual saved caption is fine. Before this I’ve had the issue where a character which isn’t in the font appears in the caption, and this prevents text from being rendered on the image, but in that case the character was a permanent part of the caption and I could search for it. I trust that you’ve reported this bug via the official channel, RT.
Hey, wait a second… ! … what happened to line breaks in comments? Don’t tell me I’ve got to dust off the old “br” html tag!
Oh, and the ability to edit comments for 5 minutes seems to have gone too. Probably just minor side effects of the fix for the deluge of images. I shan’t panic.
Also, I don’t seem to have an edit button to get rid of those massive gaps between the pictures. Oh, well.
Timewave seems to be absent, when you click on it in the episode list, nothing comes up, and keywords don’t bring up any Timewave stuff. Is this done for reasons of taste? Haha
Haha, I promise that was a totally random omission. This has now been ‘fixed’ depending on your perspective.
It taking 3 days for someone to realise that Timewave was missing. Perfect. Though it was only a matter of time before someone tried searching “droopy ass titties”. That’s a good test for most search engines, honestly. I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage.
I actually did try searching for droopy ass titties on day one for something, but it not returning a result I just assumed Dave era wasn’t uploaded or something I dunno, I didn’t think much of it and just moved on with my life.
I’m bothered that the logo isn’t hyphenated where as all of the copy around Smega-Drive is. This may or may not be related to multiple Smega-Drive entries someone might have possible just made in another shit posting thread.
I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage. This is really boring, but the episode frames and episode subtitles are stored separately. The search uses the frames database as its reference, and super random just gets any frame. So because we had the frames indexed but not the subtitles, then it was showing on one but not thother. I’m bothered that the logo isn’t hyphenated where as all of the copy around Smega-Drive is. Hah, I guess this means you’re exclusively a mobile user! The logo was modified to remove the hyphen so it would wrap more cleanly into a mobile friendly ratio but it is present on the desktop.
It taking 3 days for someone to realise that Timewave was missing. Perfect. Though it was only a matter of time before someone tried searching “droopy ass titties”. That’s a good test for most search engines, honestly. I guess Timewave was there secretly all along, because I’m sure the randomiser gave me a shot of them walking through a corridor on the Enconium at one point. Also Rimmer’s inner critic, but that could have been from the opening montage. I wanted to make this
Bit of an update tonight, I HOPE I HAVEN’T BROKEN HALF OF THE SUBTITLES AGAIN LOL. If you haven’t already give the episode browser a bit of try (link in the footer or you can click on any episode title you see to be taken to its page) as it now shows a selection from all scenes, even if they don’t have subtitles. So, for example, if you wanted to laser focus on that bit from Ouroboros where Lister brushes his teeth really aggressively, then today is your lucky day. In related news, pages or searches that are handling a lot of images will now only load them in as you scroll.
Bit of an update tonight, I HOPE I HAVEN’T BROKEN HALF OF THE SUBTITLES AGAIN LOL. If you haven’t already give the episode browser a bit of try (link in the footer or you can click on any episode title you see to be taken to its page) as it now shows a selection from all scenes, even if they don’t have subtitles. So, for example, if you wanted to laser focus on that bit from Ouroboros where Lister brushes his teeth really aggressively, then today is your lucky day. In related news, pages or searches that are handling a lot of images will now only load them in as you scroll. Very cool. Though unfortunately I am having a difficulty with it, which is that my browser seems to give up on loading the images about 3/4 of the way down the episode page. But that’s just Firefox. Chrome and Edge handle it effortlessly, the show-offs.
How interesting! I’ll look at that. If you run into it again refresh while you’re scrolled down and it should kickstart it and out you back where you were.
Ooh, addendum: it seems it does load images it’s currently stuck on if I switch tabs then switch back. The Watched Pot effect, I guess.
Did not intend to double post, but the dice are just too good. (I don’t really have the brainpower for sequences though) (Ouch)
This is brilliant guys. Congratulations! Lovely tribute to Seb as well, I’m sure he’d have adored this and been massively involved.
Well, any fleeting thoughts of a platonic fan-fiction with Crane and Kochanski scooting across the universe have now permanently gone! A great conceit though the story telling bit.
(I’m not doing the chorus parts. But if anyone else fancies finding 36 different Red Dwarf frames which convey the abstract concept of being tongue tied – and 1 that conveys the non-abstract concept of shitting your trousers, you’re welcome to do so.)
The book club and these last few posts, who’d have thought G&T would have reached its peak in 2020-2021?
(I’m not doing the chorus parts. But if anyone else fancies finding 36 different Red Dwarf frames which convey the abstract concept of being tongue tied – and 1 that conveys the non-abstract concept of shitting your trousers, you’re welcome to do so.)
Ha, OK, I stand corrected, Dear Dave is perfect (and it’s not often you’ll hear someone say that). Eh, what the heck, if we’re doing lines in isolation, let’s go for the least abstract/repetitive remaining ones. Man, I never fully processed how prevalent knees are in this song.
In this thread I have learned a lot of the lyrics to Tongue Tied that I didn’t realise I didn’t know.
GlenTokyo, gifs are something I’m trying to figure out. At the moment your browser does all the work of generating the gif and then storing it inside the webpage so you can download it to reupload elsewhere. The first thing I’ll do to make that easier is find a nice photo uploader for comments, and then after that maybe some sort of temporary storage on the Smega-Drive server for gifs, but this would have to expire so it wouldn’t be suitable for hotlinking.
Right, WordPress does seem to make it difficult to add a forum like rich text editor, but as a half way house there’s an ‘Attachments’ uploader for comments now. Add images or gifs to this and they will appear at the bottom of your comment but Gifs will still need to be downloaded from the S-D and then reuploaded here.
(I’ve also just now worked out how to use the arrows to get them the specific length, woohoo!) Edit: also the edit function is currently here! Double woohoo! What great presents for Gazpacho Soup Day 😄
A post on reddit reminded me of this … it is something of a surprise really this date isn’t made more of a deal of within the fandom really isn’t it.
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway…
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway… The party scenes are all too low-key to make a gif to accurately convey how thrilled I am to hear that! Woohoo!
Will DVD stuff and the like be added eventually? Project Maaargh: 32Xtended etc. We’re having a think how best to include deleted scenes, Smeg Ups, CSWS etc. Once we’ve fixed all the subtitles, anyway… The party scenes are all too low-key to make a gif to accurately convey how thrilled I am to hear that! Woohoo!
These abridged subtitles are getting on my various tits. Seeing them in the wild only spurs me on to get them sorted. Apologies.
These abridged subtitles are getting on my various tits. Seeing them in the wild only spurs me on to get them sorted. Apologies. Badly abridged subtitles needs to become the latest Smegadrive meme format.
This is a genuine one that completely blows the entire signficance of the episode title for Back to Reality.
This is a genuine one that completely blows the entire signficance of the episode title for Back to Reality. WOW.
I particularly like the way the next frame on from that one makes it look like Lister and Cat are in a music video for an ’80s power ballad.
It’s subtle, but if you look closely you’ll notice I edited out the closing and opening credits of the respective episodes.
Ah, glad to see one of the episodes we’ve given accurate subtitles to doing some work. If they can be edited as plain text and just emailed in, I’d happily do a swotty rewatch of series V or something. Unless it’s easier for you to do them how you’re doing.
Ah, glad to see one of the episodes we’ve given accurate subtitles to doing some work. If they can be edited as plain text and just emailed in, I’d happily do a swotty rewatch of series V or something. Unless it’s easier for you to do them how you’re doing. We appreciate that people want to submit subs, if we can find a reliable way of accepting submissions, we’ll solicit, but at the moment we’re just plodding through. We may not be fast etc etc etc etc…
We may not be fast etc etc etc etc Is this the level of attention to detail and accuracy we can expect?
I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the Smegadrive code, but I’m getting a “critical error” message on the Red Dwarf Memes thread, which now appears to be broken.
Hey, I had an idea about a potential future Smega-Drive feature (you’re short on those, right?). Would it be feasible to make it so the quick links had automatically generated alt text containing the episode name and caption? It’s not something I’d benefit from personally, but for anyone using a screen reader, memes would go from 0% comprehensible by default to at least, like, 35%.
That’s a very good point! I’ll get that added at the same time I hopefully fix this bottlenecking that’s happening.
This doesn’t fit the Memes or Randoms threads, so I’m bumping this. Sorry, but I thought it was a nice screenshot and didn’t want to waste it.
