AGABlaster - New CDXL Player Released
 

The initial alpha release of my CDXL player AGABlaster is available.

I have tested it on an A4000/60 with a Fast ATA 4000 MK-III disk controller (expansion card) and different PIO settings. AGABlaster can play videos with 24 FPS, 320x256 Lores resolution, and 8-bit stereo sound at 22050 Hz directly from disk, with the MK-III in PIO3 setting. Only chip memory is required. Alternatively, playing from an USB 2.0 memory stick connected to a DENEB USB 2.0 expansion card is also fast enough.

In contrast to other CDXL/ANIM players it can skip video frames on disk. This should allow to play videos also on slower Amiga hardware. Audio is always read from disk. It supports 24 bit colors.

This is my very first program for my AGA Amiga, I haven't tested it on any other system yet. It comes with a bunch of test videos, in case somebody wants to give it a try:
http://mschordan.github.io/amiga/agablaster.html

Youtube videos are here:
Playing from disk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2kuURFy1MM

Playing from USB memory stick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pexYpi768g8

It looks and sounds great. Well done!

Will there be an RTG version too?
Congratulations on the first video, was shot in my Province (Brindisi-Italy)

Just Amazing stuff ! :great long time i tried some CDXL convertion with the method of this website https://amigaanimecd.wordpress.com/tutorial/
but the result was awfull... i think my fault lol ! , i'd like to make same you, how did you made convertion ?
the CDXL like Amiga was so ahead his time :spin
my test on CD32 with TF330 030 CPU, not bad, but in HI resolution it show slowdown and glitches, but congratulation !;)

EDIT : i've just seen that you used ffmpeg, i very usefull program for many platform ! i used for make HAM vidéo but ham vidéos did'nt gave me a good result and it very huge !
"Which video converter did you use? I created my own CDXL conversion pipeline - a mix of ffmpeg scripts and C++ tools, mostly to experiment with video conversions and color mappings."

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

FIRST VIDEO IS : "zoraia_short_crop_lo_aga7.cdxl"
Lores 320x256 AGA7 15FPS 5:4 cropped 11025 Hz Custom 24 bit 0:17 19.0 MB

SECOND VIDEO IS : Hires 640x256 AGA8 24FPS 5:4 cropped 22050 Hz Custom 24 bit 0:17 68.1 MB (no frames skip, just laucnh video, no other parameter changed)

That's interesting! I didn't know that this was done in Italy.


I have a Picasso IV, if I find the time I will look into it - I haven't done any programming for it though. If all that is required is to copy the data into the GFX Memory and call some init routines, yes, very likely.



However, I first wanted to make sure it works on the original hardware, and add some more features, and once this is sorted out, looking into GFX cards can be next.

Thanks for uploading the video, that's amazing, it's the first time I see it run on a CD32 :)

Regarding Hires - you can try the following additional options: PL=1 FB=7 CFD=5. You can increase FB and CFD further, but at some point it will run out of chip memory. This increases the lookahead and gives it more room for skipping frames.

Regarding the conversion: yes, I use ffmpeg for extracting PNGs. The rest I do with my own tools - written in C++ & some bash scripts and run on Linux - with some experimental dead-ends and needs some clean up, but if there is interest I can release this too at some point, but for now I want to make sure that the player works on some Amigas :)

Yes in particular the area of Ostuni ""the white city (Brindisi)

Ostuni: https://youtu.be/jnnzF00pBQg

Brindisi: https://youtu.be/M_bXshEGgl4

very nice ! Italy have so much great places :great
So i've done tests with settings changes and no more gitches in 640X256 ! , it slow, normal, cpu need to be 68060 but it's just astonishing to see such quality on a low end Amiga ! ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoDp_DodsPw

theses are errors i had with others settings :
https://i.ibb.co/9W6ZG4f/Capture-d-c...1-11-36-31.png
hostings

i will do test with TF328...;

Did a Flight Test on WinUAE OS 3.1 040 JIT:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1UP...rC0Fhn4nxdp8Hd

new tests in low and high resolution for the TF328*, not bad at all !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsVHFFzzzEM

I know this may seem silly, but I just tried this on AmiKit X on my now ancient PC, and it was very impressive, well done!

Edited to add more information: My PC is an old AMD Phenom II x4 955, so it's not exactly fast, and I was playing the CDXL file directly off my NAS, rather than from local storage, and it was still nice and smooth. I'm now looking for more files to test it with.

Ok, this could very well be user error here, but I just tried AGABlaster with a different CDXL file, [AmigaAnimeCD][cdxl]akira1.zip (not sure if I can link to it here, but that's easily found if need be), and it failed attempting to play the CDXL file on that ISO:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VquRramYw3m3nARE7

I checked to see if the file played with the player included on the ISO image, and that played without issue under Amikit X. I'm not sure if this will be of any help or not, but I hope so.

Yes, PL=1 doesn't work the way it should, that's a bug (I just tested it).
For example, PL=2 FB=7 CFD=5 works.
You can also simply not set PL, default is 5.

Note that the HAM8 file is a lores file, you renamed this one to 'hi' ;)

I never heard of this TF328 before, interesting.

AGABlaster is really powerful, tested on WinUAE with a CD32 Standard + HD and an A1200 Standard configuration (Kick 3.0 68020/2MB RAM) and the video is smooth and qualitative.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vQ...sANfdEzNIs7hxV

That was a bug, thanks for pointing it out. I have fixed the issue (a 12 bit color palette issue). You can download version 0.9.63. I currently only support PAL full screen, and AGABlaster will report an "unsupported screen size" because this video is 320x196, but you can use the option FORCE to override this. The video displays correctly within its height, but you will see garbage beyond its height.
Try: agablaster 1.cdxl FR=22050 FORCE

(I guessed 22050, you may need to adjust the frequency).
Nice videos, I have never seen them before.

Ahh, great work. That was just one of the first results I found when I did a search for "CDXL Amiga video" when I was looking for something to test with.

Video CDXL Akira1 also works well with the V.A.M.P. Player, only the audio is very fast :p

@ movec
Your videos don't work on V.A.M.P. :p

Indeed! Thanks for the links! The cat is then probably a local from Brindisi or Ostuni ;)

The videos I have uploaded so far are custom CDXLs with some extensions for 24 bit colors, exact timing, and padding for data alignment - that's why V.A.M.P. cannot play them - nothing wrong with V.A.M.P. ;)