CDXL Toolkit

[dkovacs]

Hi;

Can someone upload the CDXL toolkit? I am looking to encode some videos. I know it was on the zone a few years back but can't find my copy of it anywhere.

Thanks,

Dan

[TCD]

Took it from the Amiga Developer CD. Have a look in the zone

[dkovacs]

Many thanks!

[Zetr0]

@thread

I was thinking about this the other day - and was wondering what limmitations CDXL has.

say on a fast amiga 10+MIPS - how many colours (depth) can it display and what frequency audio ?

would CDXL work on RTG graphics solutions and AHI - its it possible to encode a 16bit audio stream with an 8 bit 15/16 or 24bit colour screen ?

how quick is it - how much prefecthing would it need to do?

I was wondering - given a fast CPU lots of RAM and Disk space - could I encode a short 30 minute episode of some cartoon ?

think I could get a full 320x256 screen running on a CD32?

[Akiko]

@Zetro

There is a very good CDXL player for OS 4, maybe it could be ported to 3.9?

http://os4depot.net/index.php?functi...y/cdxlplay.lha

[Zetr0]

interesting,

thanks Akiko =)

[dkovacs]

It'd be neat to have a tool that would run under windows to convert avi/mpg to cdxl directly.

[dkovacs]

OK, so I've taken an MPG, dropped the frame rate to 12fps, converted the frames to 160x100ish IFF files, stripped out the audio and attempted to re-assemble the files into a CDXL video, however, I've run into a snag.

I've done some searches of the board here and can't really find any documentation on how to reassemble everything into CDXL. There used to be a website hosted on geocities where there was some info but that site is down now and there's nothing on web.archive.org. I've tried xlmake -f 2903 -b img Video.cdxl but it doesn't actually do anything.

Can someone point me to a tutorial or some documentation?

Thanks,

Dan

[Zetr0]

I am sure I remember a fellow forum chummie making CDXL 25 minute Anime/Manga cartoon CDXL's for the CD32...

I am sure I remember it...

[Cammy]

I followed that guide back when it was online, and made a couple of CDXL videos that play on a 2X CDROM drive like the CD32. The videos are 320x64, which is doubled in height by the Copper to be 320x128, which is almost the full screen width and half the height, so it keeps roughly the same aspect ratio as a 16:9 widescreen film.

CDXL is limited to Amiga planar modes, the best you can get from it is either 256 unique colours per frame, or 4,096 colours all up for the whole animation. The existing CDXL players aren't even bug-free, and will still display graphical glitches onscreen while playing, I think it has to do with the palette swapping in 8bit mode, since it doesn't happen in 12bit mode.

If you'd like to check out the two clips, which I made to demonstrate that it's possible to create acceptable looking widescreen video on the CD32, I uploaded them a while ago to the EAB fileserver. They're just a short clip from the film "I Am Legend". They're in the /Misc/Vid directory on the fileserver.

[Retro1234]

Maybe not suitable for CD palyback but theres Damage_X software you can convert a film to HAM6 video under windows quite easily

Heres the thread

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=48784

and a guide to convertion here

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=650862#post650862

and some films
[ Show youtube player ]
[ Show youtube player ]
[ Show youtube player ]

[nujack]

Try out the Convert2CDXL-Toolkit, which is available on Aminet or CD32-Allianz(http://www.cd32-allianz.de/cdxl/convert2cdxl/intro). There is also a german documentation available, that describes how you create a movie in cdxl-format and how you convert mpeg to cdxl.
If you don't own an Amiga try out the program under WinUAE.

[Zetr0]

@Cammy

I was quite impressed with the 256.cdxl clip - however the ham6.cdxl all the colours were wrong - like it either had the wrong pen colour or it wasn't opening up a HAM screen.

I emulated it with ClassicWorkbench 68k and ClassicWorkbench Advanced - alas CWOS3.9 didn't display a picture.

what am I doing wrong?

[Mad-Matt]

Try it in Multiview.

[Cammy]

It's possible that those two files are named wrong, and the "256" one is actually the HAM6 one. The 256 colour one has a different palette for every frame, so the black borders will keep switching between black and other dark colours. I think switching palettes that fast caused a buffer problem in the player I used, which displayed graphical glitches. The HAM one should work fine with the right player, but it's full of HAM colour bleeding.

I think I used this program to play them - http://aminet.net/package/gfx/show/cdgsxl

[dirk_the_daring]

Originally Posted by Cammy

I followed that guide back when it was online, and made a couple of CDXL videos that play on a 2X CDROM drive like the CD32. The videos are 320x64, which is doubled in height by the Copper to be 320x128, which is almost the full screen width and half the height, so it keeps roughly the same aspect ratio as a 16:9 widescreen film.

Hi Cammy, and how do you double height? I mean I have created a CDXL 320x64 but I don't known how to streech it when playback (cause I guess the effect you talk will be something similar to James Pond 2 CDXL sequence, that is full screen but seems doubled sized).

[dirk_the_daring]

Got it "sdbl", thanks for the hint anyway