Amiga movies possible on stock OCS machine?

[DDNI]

Originally Posted by desiv

That video is NSFW btw...

Heads up..

desiv

LOL thats true, good point...

Heres one featuring live action rather than animation.
[ Show youtube player ]

[desiv]

Originally Posted by DDNI

LOL thats true, good point...

Heres one featuring live action rather than animation.
[ Show youtube player ]

Better (kindof), but depending on where you work, could still be iffy if the boss walked by.

Not that they aren't impressive WB background pics tho...

The "hovering" NSFW boxes were a nice touch tho!

desiv

p.s. Nice quality video btw...

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by gulliver

Why HAM6 is not feasible from my point of view:

Well, if the proposed Amiga Video Format draft is taken into account, due to the way HAM works, in an attempt to move an image around the screen (such as subtitles, timing info, etc) will generate noticeable fringing that will degrade the quality of the image a lot. This is typical behaviour of an Amiga in HAM mode trying to move a blitter object around.
Also it has restrictions on color combinations between adjacent pixels that can only be avoided with careful planning and a few neat tricks. So I think no.

You want to leave out Ham6 because possible subtitles might not look so good? That's a mistake, see after the quotes. Subtitles would only be possible if you reserve two colors, using the closest colors in the palette may result in unreadable text. Also, you don't have 32 selectable colors anyway, because you need the screen color to be black at all times, or the borders will change colors all the time. That leaves 31 colors for the frame...

Originally Posted by gulliver

Changed my view on EHB:

While not present on the very first few A1000 NTSC models sold in USA and Canada, it sure provides 64 colors, so it could be implemented provided the player program checks that the EHB mode is available, and if not just ignore the offending bit and play the video at 32 colors. In this case we have to be carefull on datarates, which will obviously raise.

When you leave out the 6th bit from an EHB image, you'll get an ugly looking image, so that's not a good idea.

About the subtitles:

What would you need sub titles for anyway? It's not like watching a movie in this kind of format would be a very pleasant experience, and what's the point? You'd have to convert the whole movie to raw, and then you have to convert all the frames to something the Amiga can display properly. Doesn't sound like anything that's going to be used for such purposes. An hour of video in this format already uses up about 3600 MB, so you'd need a dvd drive on your Amiga to use the video.

EHB and 32 colors will most certainly look uglier than some Ham fringing, so Ham 6 certainly has to be an option. It's better that way anyway. Let the maker of the video decide what image format to use, rather than to limit them to EHB or 32 colors.

[gulliver]

@Thorham

You got yourself stuck on this subtitles thing, which was just mentioned.
HAM is not a viable option due to fringing, when i mentioned subtitles i was just adding just a tiny grain of sand against HAm, subtitles are not the primary issue, while fringing is, along with the other HAM limitations we all know.

QUOTE from @Thorham:

What would you need subtitles for anyway? It's not like watching a movie in this kind of format would be a very pleasant experience, and what's the point? You'd have to convert the whole movie to raw, and then you have to convert all the frames to something the Amiga can display properly. Doesn't sound like anything that's going to be used for such purposes. An hour of video in this format already uses up about 3600 MB, so you'd need a dvd drive on your Amiga to use the video.

EHB and 32 colors will most certainly look uglier than some Ham fringing, so Ham 6 certainly has to be an option. It's better that way anyway. Let the maker of the video decide what image format to use, rather than to limit them to EHB or 32 colors.

END OF QUOTE

Again subtitles are not that important! Video is!
While you say that watching a movie like this is not a pleasant experience, then you missed the point. Dude, we are speaking of Amigas, as a hobby computer, doing it for fun. We are not gonna convince the film industry to adopt this format, neither convince anyone over here to dare compare it with a PC displaying HDTV video. It is good enough, if you disagree then, what are you doing over here? Amigas are good machines but they cannot compete with mainstream PCs, Macs, etc. Look, the same happens when people use their Amigas to surf the net: You have no java, no flash, but if you are lucky you may have CSS! So following your point of view then that should be a "not pleasant experience". Another example could be playing 2D games with AGA resolution and paula audio. You may also say "this is not a pleasant experience". Yes we know we dont properly have accelerated 3D graphics 7.1 16 bit sound and the latest titles.
So my friend the point is that we keep our Amigas, not because they are better than everything else, but just because the fun of it, and the memories we have attached to their usage. So for you, watching a movie on an Amiga is not a pleasant experience, i get it, but then it is so cool to be able to do it on 80´s hardware, i for one will do it!

Of course format convertion needs to take place, but that is the job of the encoding software, which could be reasonably done on mainstream (while having it on an Amiga would be great too!). No one in their right mind would keep an hour of video in uncompressed format in an Amiga, due to space requirements, but as mentioned in a previous post, it should be fairly simple to reuse a simple file compression format and when the player needs to fetch that data, it uses one of those already available amiga libraries that let you read inside compressed files.

Of course, the developer can decide the image format to use, i am not saying this format is compulsory, it is merely a draft which is open to modifications and sugestions. It is a format designed with the goal of being playable on nearly every Amiga. As i mentioned before, if you dont like it, because you find it limiting, use another, better quality format like MPEG 2, but then, very few Amigas will be able to cope with it. So at the end you are free to choose, and that is what really counts!

I hope you dont take it personally, it is not my intention to annoy you, i am just trying to make a point

[Cammy]

Subtitles are important to deaf people like me.

If you were to add subtitle support to an animation/video viewer like this, the text would not need to be overlaid on top of the image, but could be on a separate screen in front of the video screen, at the bottom. Like a screen that's dragged down to show the one behind it. This would avoid any HAM artifacts, and I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make a program that starts showing a .srt file at the same time it starts playing the video.

[Cammy]

Amigas have been used for timing subtitles for years. Everyone knows Amigas with genlocks were the perfect way to add titles to any video, and they have perfect timing with video playback.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by desiv

That video is NSFW btw...

Heads up..

desiv

Damn, read this too late..oh well it woke the rest of the office up

[NovaCoder]

I use MooVid/Action on my 030 50Mhz AGA machine, it has a HAM Storm dither which looks amazing if you stand well back from the monitor

It is very slow on my machine though, I guess that it's only running at about 4fps with a 320x200 AVI. A clocked 060 would do much better, apparently they can run such movies at 15fps+ which would make them perfectly watchable.....now, where can I get an 060 for < $100?

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gulliver

@ImmortalA1000
And i nearly forget! A600 can have fastmem without acceleration, just plug one of those PCMCIA 16bit ram cards. (from 1, 2 and even 4 MB.)

Ahh those things, they are very slow aren't they or is that just compared to the Fast ram in the 32bit AGA. Are the PCMCIA memory upgrades for the A600 slower than fast ram in a trapdoor expansion attached to an A500 or internal 256kb RAM cart on the nose of the A1000? I've got 2mb's on my A600 myself but that's all chipram as it's a trapdoor 1mb card.

I agree HAM6 has problems but for different reasons....mainly it is not possible to display it in a workbench window so really is only useful in full screen modes of 320x200 or 320x256 etc. Subtitles aren't really a problem you can hard code those I guess. I don't see the point in playing a 160x100 movie on a blank background full screen and as that's the lowest resolution for the Amiga @320x2?? etc. But then maybe the player should be flagged a movie is HAM and automatically go full screen...whereas EHB and below give the option to be in a window on the desktop*

The bit about NTSC and PAL...really it's not an issue. The data is simply written to screen to form your frames and the modulator will display it as PAL or NTSC. The only issue is 320x200 on NTSC is 4:3 and 320x256 is more like 14:9 or something (the inbetween mode of zooming on old CRT 16:9 TVs etc)

The framerate really is not an issue as long as the screen changes are VSYNC'd...20 fps to us humans is a comfortably smooth rate of change to allow the illusion of movement to form

*That's still a problem though...32 colour workbench is not possible on ECS

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by DDNI

Uploaded a video of HAM6 fullscreen to Youtube. It is some sort of anime opening titles.

[ Show youtube player ]

Is it possible to capture the actual Amiga's output or redo this and digitally record the output from UAE....filming a monitor is not really going to give a true indication of how fringing will affect the final animation as it is lost in so many stages of quality degradation from Amiga---->Youtube video posted.

Originally Posted by Thorham

EHB and 32 colors will most certainly look uglier than some Ham fringing, so Ham 6 certainly has to be an option. It's better that way anyway. Let the maker of the video decide what image format to use, rather than to limit them to EHB or 32 colors.

This is simply not possible to comment on, depends on a lot of things...mainly

How bad is the fringing
And how short are the EHB palettes to the source original.

If the video is highly saturated with many many transitions in Luma and Chroma within the frame then EHB is in trouble due to lack of colour resolution available but if it is a subtle kind of colouring like for example a clip from the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow then HAM fringing will be more random and more unsettling to watch than a non dithered nicely processed EHB image. It's kinda like when do you use a 256 colour GIF or a compromised high compression JPEG on a webpage if you like.

Personally as long as BOTH EHB and HAM6 are there then that's fine, like I said for all 2 rev 0.0001AA board A1000 users in the world don't screw up a perfectly acceptable compromise...the number of non EHB A1000 machines still going today are negligible and should not be a factor in determining choices for 99.999999% of active Amiga users out there

Originally Posted by Cammy

Subtitles are important to deaf people like me.

If you were to add subtitle support to an animation/video viewer like this, the text would not need to be overlaid on top of the image, but could be on a separate screen in front of the video screen, at the bottom. Like a screen that's dragged down to show the one behind it. This would avoid any HAM artifacts, and I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make a program that starts showing a .srt file at the same time it starts playing the video.

In the case of a full screen video you could also use the hardware sprites as a sort of virtual second playfield also. Doesn't have to go edge to edge and sprite heights are unlimited. Not sure how much CPU/Copper time this takes away in total.

Originally Posted by DDNI

I am running it on my A1200T and it is impressive.
He just sent me the conversion guide and software.

What CPU are you using in the videos?

[ImmortalA1000]

I think we should test the code on a standard WinUAE config for a 1mb Fast and 1mb Chip RAM A500 with a fast PC hard drive on the host computer supplying the video file. This way you can get a feel for what is possible and negate any issues with the transfer/seek times of an old Amiga hard drive and see if the chipset is up to it in the first place for each setting of colours/resolution/FPS required.

Does anyone have such a setup...say a 3.5" IDE PC drive formatted as an Amiga partition for UAE?

[gulliver]

@All
I think we are waisting to much energy discussing wether or not HAM or EHB should be included. Lets include them both despite their own limitations, so that everyone is happy killing interface storage bandwith and living a fringing life
So for the others that think our Amigas cannot cope with that amount of data, we can simply skip the HAM/EHB bit at playback.

@ImmortalA1000
Those low resolutions, which are not fullscreen are for having the chance of displaying video on the workbench desktop, for previewing purposes, and for the cool thing it should be

@Cammy and @ImmortalA1000
When i said subtitles are not important, i said it in the context, that what it is really important at this point in time is to get first just the video playback, not the sound, timing, subtitles, scene selection, menus, and the other stuff. While your ideas about displaying subtitles in other screens or using sprites is of course very feasible and are really worth considering. Still, personally, i think we should have various options to display them so we can choose from what we like, or think it is best. I believe .srt support should not be difficult and is a must (so that we can leech subtitles from the internet and dont have the task of generating our own for every movie out there)

[Retro1234]

I think it looks good even with a camera pointed at the screen seems like a lot of work? how long does it take to convert-Is your Archos working yet and can the conversion software be uploaded.

Did anyone ever download anything from EAB member ziovax homepage when it was working? he had a project of converting some Manga style films to CDXL.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by gulliver

HAM is not a viable option due to fringing, when i mentioned subtitles i was just adding just a tiny grain of sand against HAm, subtitles are not the primary issue, while fringing is, along with the other HAM limitations we all know.

HAM6 is viable; it's just as viable as any other lowres format, because a little fringing won't hurt that much. Also, it's possible to reduce this a lot, see below.

Originally Posted by gulliver

So my friend the point is that we keep our Amigas, not because they are better than everything else, but just because the fun of it, and the memories we have attached to their usage. So for you, watching a movie on an Amiga is not a pleasant experience, i get it, but then it is so cool to be able to do it on 80´s hardware, i for one will do it!

You don't have to explain to me why we use Amigas, I have one, and I use it, rather than WinUAE. The whole point is: Why not try and squeeze the highest possible quality out of ECS, rather than omitting the color mode that has the potential to look the best?

Originally Posted by gulliver

I hope you dont take it personally, it is not my intention to annoy you, i am just trying to make a point

No, I don't, don't worry about it

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

If the video is highly saturated with many many transitions in Luma and Chroma within the frame then EHB is in trouble due to lack of colour resolution available but if it is a subtle kind of colouring like for example a clip from the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow then HAM fringing will be more random and more unsettling to watch than a non dithered nicely processed EHB image. It's kinda like when do you use a 256 colour GIF or a compromised high compression JPEG on a webpage if you like.

With HAM6, you can set fifteen palette colors in the border, per scan line. For 320x200, this amounts to 6000 extra bytes per frame, and because you probably only need to change the palette colors every two scanlines, 3000 bytes would be enough.This will reduce HAM fringingly significantly. Might be an option (if the bandwidth allows it).

Originally Posted by gulliver

So for the others that think our Amigas cannot cope with that amount of data, we can simply skip the HAM/EHB bit at playback.

Sadly, you can't leave out bits, because they're taken in account when the frame was rendered. Se example:

This is 320x200 EHB.

And this is the same image with the 6th bit ignored.


Clearly this is not a good idea

[ImmortalA1000]

Is there a program on the PC that will render EHB or HAM mode images (from standard PNG/BMP/JPEG files etc) and give an accurate preview?

[gulliver]

Atari 800XL video playback

[ Show youtube player ]

From what i could find out about this (some copy&paste) :

The "trick" is that this movie is pre-converted to an atari 8bit graphics format. It is called the GTIA mode. The GTIA mode is a cool and fast mode, allowing you to show 16 shades at one scanline. It takes not that much KB's to show one pic. With a modern HD connected (that is necessary!) & the right tool, it is possible to load and show all the pictures.The whole thing is streamed from the ide.



C64 video playback

[ Show youtube player ]

From what i could find out about this (some copy&paste) :

Not to be confused with famous 1988 Digitize Design fully digital demo. This one is actually a combination of digitized animation and SID chip generated music. Frames are being streamed realtime from 1541 disk drive, and as you can see, the playback is perfect.




Spectrum video playback

[ Show youtube player ]

From what i could find out about this (some copy&paste) :

It is a work in progress. it's not compressed video at the moment, but to get the 1200 screen$ files for the short video was step one. Still I think this is already very cool! And for you to be able to do the same I included comments so you know how I did it. Oh, one step was to create a video with the correct resolution. I used Adobe Premiere Elements for that, but it should also be possible with Virtual Dub. Anyway, now I will start programming to get the algoritms I created for compressed video working. Have fun!


PS: Sorry, this is just for the fun of it

[Photon]

Well, converting videos to formats that are easier on the CPU is no biggie, and no trick. It's done all the time for PSP, mobile phones etc.

To stream it properly, I think you need to write a custom player. HAM certainly promises the best quality for OCS/ECS. With a 68000 CPU, that leaves only 50% of the CPU memory accesses between vblanks. Losing color depth to say 16 colors would help, but I'd rather shrink the frame size. 288x216 isn't so small.

You need to load the frames, and show the frames. If a compressed format is used, there's very little time to decompress it, even if it's a lossless IFF-anim-like format and using the blitter to blit the changes between frames. If the blitter is used, it will run at 50% and CPU (without fastram) at "1%" for the duration of the bitplane DMA.

Also, you need to load the data, and I'm not so sure SCSI with DMA will allow stutter-free streaming. If IDE is used, CPU does all the loading, and unless you use CPU-based compression it will load to chipmem and could go as low as 300-500KB/s then.

At the above frame size, no compression, 25 fps, that's 46656 bytes/frame or 1.15 MB/s.

So, compression is necessary; the best CF cards load at about 800-900 KB/s with no fastmem. Best bet is something simple that uses the blitter, I think. But it's not 100% certain that 46k can't be loaded to chipmem in two vblanks' time on most controllers.

Reducing chroma a bit and using 16 greyscales as the HAM base colors would help with luma aberrations (at the penalty of introducing some grey pixels, but it would be 'more okay' than anything else I think).


Fastmem would instantly make it much more viable, even uncompressed, on an A1000 and up. But as you know I'm an A500 512k chip/512k slow fetishist... And then it would be less of a challenge, just shrink framesize until it loads smoothly, sort of.

[Cammy]

It seems a lot like you guys are trying to reinvent CDXL to do the same thing it already does, but making it more limited.

All we really need is a newer CDXL player.

I wouldn't worry so much about fringing... TV and VHS recording will screw it up anyway and YouTube compression/encoding format won't see it. Secondly, we are talking a blink of an eye. A single frame of NTSC video is full of artifacts, bleed, ect. anyway so it will not be seen or much to notice anyway. Any Amiga still frame quality image is more then sufficient for TV animation. Not even the original drawings of a cartoon is perfect and crisp. They have subtle smudges/ect.

In the end, it don't mater. The artifacts /fringes are small and not much to worry.

I love to see a HAM8 video - true A1200/4000 power. Show me, boys and girls.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Cammy

It seems a lot like you guys are trying to reinvent CDXL to do the same thing it already does, but making it more limited.

All we really need is a newer CDXL player.

Don't know about other people, but for me it goes something like

how fast can you read in and display raw uncompressed HAM6/EHB images with agnus and CF-IDE in frames per second and go from there.

@wildstar
Depends what the fringe colours are...if it's bright blue or red next to black then you will notice it...like colour snow on a dodgy RF signal but worse

Youtube destroys resolution detail but at the expensive of keeping the colourpsace conversion higher...bit like WMV but a lot worse