#111289 - Dtime35 - Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:11 pm
I have a question, there is only two movie players for the ds as of now. Both work but they are either low quality or something else. Is it possible to make a homebrew Movie player, and if so what are the limits to playback, and also what are the limits to file types.
#111304 - OOPMan - Tue Dec 05, 2006 4:34 pm
Right now I'd say the first step would be the development of a proper video codec. Most of what I've heard of DPG and MPEG and the DS are not good, hence a proper codec would be necessary if you wanted ton get serious about movie play...
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#111320 - Lynx - Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:04 pm
What's high quality? Take any high quality video you have and re-encode it (with any codec you choose) to 256x192... Is it still high quality? Becasue that would be the best you could hope for on the DS screen.
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#111326 - OOPMan - Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:23 pm
Take a look at some of the videos in commercial DS games encoded using the ActImagine codec Lynx. Those are high quality.
This is in part because many of them are well done. The few I've seen that are are bad are not bad due to the codec.
The video quality itself is very good, which would seem to indicate that the ActImagine codec actually does a good job of compressing video for the DS and does a similarly good job of decompressing it on the fly.
The key point would be that non-commercial video on the DS does not automatically have to look bad. Given the codecs available, however, they tend to...
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"My boot, your face..." - Attributed to OOPMan, Emperor of Eroticon VI
You can find my NDS homebrew projects here...
#111328 - NeX - Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:25 pm
I personally think that the best way to do it would be with a text map - and make a compressor that optimizes the movie to a 8x8 pixel tile grid.
#111372 - Firon - Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:37 pm
Currently, the easiest way to improve the video quality is to optimize the MPEG decoder such that it's fast enough to do dithering in realtime, as well as use higher framerates. That would do a LOT for video quality (and don't encode with dpgenc, use BatchDPG).
It's easy to see that the quality of DPG is actually pretty good by playing them back on the PC with DPGPlay. The color depth of the DS's screen is really what hurts it.
Secondly, optimizing the MP2 decoder so you can use higher bitrates without skipping, as well as do 4x oversampling, instead of the 1x that it's doing right now.
Of course, being able to use something more advanced than MPEG-1 would give you the possibility of having smaller files, and probably somewhat better video quality. A more advanced audio codec would be nice too (Vorbis with tremor in low accuracy mode would be great!), but I'm not sure what you can pull off with the ARM7's limited power. This would be much, much more complicated to pull off though.
We really would need dedicated coders that could code well and optimize stuff heavily enough for this to be possible. It is not impossible, it's just that no one's really tried (not including the two commercial codecs).
#111403 - OOPMan - Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:21 am
3 Commercial Codecs :-)
There's also a Bink DS, thanks to the guys over at RAD Game Tools :-)
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"My boot, your face..." - Attributed to OOPMan, Emperor of Eroticon VI
You can find my NDS homebrew projects here...
#111428 - Dtime35 - Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:01 pm
So since there is 3 commercial codecs isn't there a way then just to use them to run videos. Though I have no clue how to get a hold of the codecs.
#111429 - OOPMan - Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:02 pm
No, they're not free for use, I'm afraid...
I think ActImagine is part of the official dev kit as well...
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"My boot, your face..." - Attributed to OOPMan, Emperor of Eroticon VI
You can find my NDS homebrew projects here...
#111491 - Lynx - Thu Dec 07, 2006 1:38 am
| Quote: |
| using the ActImagine codec Lynx. Those are high quality. |
My bad.. I guess I'm used to refering to 1920x1080i on my 55" tv as "high quality".. :)
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#111496 - Firon - Thu Dec 07, 2006 2:13 am
| OOPMan wrote: |
3 Commercial Codecs :-)
There's also a Bink DS, thanks to the guys over at RAD Game Tools :-) |
Oh, cool. I didn't know Bink was offering their codec too. They like to release tools for free, so maybe we can get 'em to release something for us... :)
Someone wanna give e-mailing them a shot? :P
#111525 - OOPMan - Thu Dec 07, 2006 8:57 am
Weeeel, they happily release their players for free, but their encoding stuff is licensed out. It's how they make money :-)
Hehehe, Lynx, if I had a 55" TV I might be similarly discerning ;-)
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"My boot, your face..." - Attributed to OOPMan, Emperor of Eroticon VI
You can find my NDS homebrew projects here...
#111632 - Firon - Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:06 pm
Actually, the encoder is also released for free. :P RAD Game Tools can encode to bink (and smacker if you want).
#111642 - OOPMan - Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:55 pm
I'm not sure the DS stuff is free, though, which is what I was talking about...
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"My boot, your face..." - Attributed to OOPMan, Emperor of Eroticon VI
You can find my NDS homebrew projects here...