Niconico Movie Maker

» see www5.ssw.co.jp/nmm/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Niconico's official video-making tool came from a software house that otherwise sold sequencers and vocal synthesis packages. Internet Co., Ltd. released it free for Windows on 5 March 2008, with Niconico's official badge on it, and Dwango's name appears nowhere on the thing. You gave Niconico Movie Maker a set of still images and an audio file, then dragged them along a track to set how long each one held, with a fade if you wanted one. Out came a single Flash file carrying the extension .nmm, which only one website in the world would accept.

By October that year it had stopped being a rendering tool only. Version 1.00.6 let it push any existing SWF you already had up to Niconico's video backend, which turned a music video editor into the platform's general purpose Flash client. The company advertised exactly that, in a bullet on its own product page: NMM is the only thing that can upload swf files. That sentence is why the ending went the way it did.

A paid version arrived on 20 February 2009 that could handle real video, and the free one kept getting patches until 1 November 2012, after which nothing more was done to it for thirty months. The tool itself never broke. What it made simply stopped being accepted.

~ the chronicle ~

~ six hundred and forty seconds ~

Every video made with it topped out at six hundred and forty seconds, and Japanese Wikipedia is careful about whose fault that was: not a limitation of the software but of the SWF format itself, which caps how many frames a file can hold. Ten minutes and forty seconds, set by the container rather than by anyone who ever used it.

Within that ceiling it made a form. A still picture, sometimes just one, held for the length of a song, with the comment stream running across it. Outside Japan this barely registered as a category of video at all, because outside Japan the comment layer was not there and a static image with audio was something you skipped. The form needs a site where the picture is a backdrop for a crowd writing across it, and there was exactly one such site, which was the one the tool could upload to.

~ what ended, and what the notice did not say ~

Internet Co. went first. On 28 May 2015 it posted a notice saying that in consequence of a specification change at Niconico, namely the end of new video posting by SWF file, distribution of the free version of Niconico Movie Maker would cease that same day. The paid version, it added, would continue to be sold. The downloads stopped immediately, which left three weeks in which the program was still on people's hard drives and still worked.

Niconico's own notice is stamped 18 June 2015 at 14:00. Top of its list of what ended that day is posting videos as SWF files by way of Niconico Movie Maker, with the ニコる reaction button and the speed checker underneath. It offers thanks for long patronage and no reason for any of them. ITmedia's writeup led on the loss of ニコる and got to the tool further down the page, under a headline that did not mention it.

It is worth separating two Flash deaths that get collapsed into one. Adobe retired Flash on 31 December 2020, and Niconico turned off its own Flash player on 15 December that year. The upload path closed in June 2015, five and a half years ahead of both, by a decision Niconico made on its own and never explained. Nothing in the record supports reading this as the industry's Flash exit arriving early.

~ what the converter could not keep ~

Existing videos were safe, and the notice said so: material posted before the cutoff could still be watched as before. Keeping that promise took six more years. Conversion to MP4 began on 9 April 2018 and covered everything uploaded before 8 December 2016, and the completion notice went up on 14 June 2021: everything in the old SWF and FLV formats had been rewritten into something nearly any device could play, except for a residue that would not convert at all, and those were deleted on 22 June 2021.

139,284 videos on Niconico still carry the tag with the tool's name, which counts the tag rather than the authorship. Two of them are worth naming. The famous Bad Apple!! shadow animation exists because of a still-image NMM upload from 8 June 2008 asking somebody, anybody, to please draw a PV for the song; it now has over three million views and carries the tags "the root of all this" and "gravestone". And from December 2008 there is a short one titled "click to jump to my list", watched over 1.6 million times, which was a Flash file built around the fact that you could click it. It plays today as MP4. Whatever it was asking you to do, the file it now lives in cannot do.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »