Amiga 4000/60: HAM8 video playing @ 25 FPS on HD flat screen

[movec]

Hello - this is my first posting in this forum. I hope it meets the interests here.

Some time ago I discussed with a friend the capabilities of the Amiga. The question was how could one present the Amiga in a way such that it is easy to relate the Amiga's graphics capabilities to a today's PC. So I came up with the idea having the Amiga show a video of about 3-4 mins on an HD flat screen in exactly the same way as a PC does in full screen mode, meaning you can put them side-by-side and it looks almost the same (from some distance).

After several dead ends, flickering screens, and Gurus .. I came up with the following result: With a 68060 and HAM8 I can get 25 FPS at LowRes resolution now. The HAM8 converter png2ilbm, which I found mentioned here in this forum some time ago, worked best for me. I converted a video to an Anim7L with 320x251 @ 25 FPS in HAM8 with a separate color palette in each frame and 3 minutes play length; stretched on the flat screen it appears as 16:9 video. Total ANIM7L file size is 290 MB. It takes 5 min to load the anim7L file into memory (from disk I get only about 12 FPS). It all plays on OS 3.9 (my Amiga has 400MB memory). As player I used viewtek.

Finally, I took a video of the Amiga playing the Anim7L video and added the music (of the original video). My goal was to produce a youtube video that I can show to people who know little about the Amiga and that allows to demonstrate to them how good the Amiga actually was and is today.

Here is the video, in case you want to have a look - I just put it on youtube:
[ Show youtube player ]

If you know better solutions I'd be interested to know more about them.

cheers,
Markus

[Anakirob]

Interesting, I have a couple of questions.

How much slower would this play on an 020 AGA Amiga? I was of the understanding that displaying a sequence of HAM8 images would be more Copper/Blitter intensive than CPU intensive, so I wouldn't imagine a faster CPU makes much difference (some fastram however would).

Is Viewtek the only player you tried?

Finally, you are in the land of NTSC and yet it seems you used a PAL screenmode, is there any reason why? And can you also get 30fps in NTSC mode with 51 less vertical lines?

[TroyWilkins]

Not bad, not bad at all.

Welcome to the forum, may I suggest you make a post in the Member Introductions section, tell us a bit about yourself, your Amiga, and so forth?

If I may make a suggestion or two, while this looks great, it also looks like it could have been done in a video editing program, overlaying the video over the top of a still frame. While it may not look as "professional", it would make it look much more authentic if we saw the workbench screen before and after, and if we could see proof that it's on that screen, so perhaps moving the camera so it's not at a perfect 90 degree viewing angle for the whole thing?

I've read about other ways of doing this, instead of using an anim 7 file format, using a more raw data format that takes up much more disk space, but streaming it directly, provided you have a fast enough storage device (which the A4000s IDE may not be fast enough, not sure), but I've seen this done on A500s - obviously not in HAM8.

[movec]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Interesting, I have a couple of questions.

How much slower would this play on an 020 AGA Amiga? I was of the understanding that displaying a sequence of HAM8 images would be more Copper/Blitter intensive than CPU intensive, so I wouldn't imagine a faster CPU makes much difference (some fastram however would).

I don't know, I don't have a 68020. I tried it in the fs-uae emulator and in 68040 mode it was slightly too slow. On my Amiga it is too slow with anim5 and anim7S. It's only fast enough with anim7L.
Why would it be blitter intensive? Most work is done by the CPU decoding the delta compression of the anim7 into chip mem and then switch between the buffers. The copper lists of the buffer should be the same, only the CPU copies the colors into them for each frame. That's how I assume it works, but I never looked at the code.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Is Viewtek the only player you tried?

I also tried cyberanim. Cyberanim appears to be 2-3 frames faster, but it cannot handle different color paletts (it runs but creates flicker). With HAM8 and a fixed color palette Cyberanim works OK.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Finally, you are in the land of NTSC and yet it seems you used a PAL screenmode, is there any reason why? And can you also get 30fps in NTSC mode with 51 less vertical lines?

I am in the land of NTSC but I am using a PAL Amiga (using a power converter).

[movec]

Originally Posted by TroyWilkins

If I may make a suggestion or two, while this looks great, it also looks like it could have been done in a video editing program, overlaying the video over the top of a still frame. While it may not look as "professional", it would make it look much more authentic if we saw the workbench screen before and after, and if we could see proof that it's on that screen, so perhaps moving the camera so it's not at a perfect 90 degree viewing angle for the whole thing?

Yes, I thought of this as well. If there is interest I thought about doing a making-of, showing 1:1 vs stretched, zooming in and out etc. There is a lot more to say, for example I need to adjust the monitor once the video has started running (zoom in and adjust the clock cycle etc.). Maybe this could be improved when I would run in overscan mode.

Originally Posted by TroyWilkins

I've read about other ways of doing this, instead of using an anim 7 file format, using a more raw data format that takes up much more disk space, but streaming it directly, provided you have a fast enough storage device (which the A4000s IDE may not be fast enough, not sure), but I've seen this done on A500s.

Do you have a link? I have seen a couple of formats mentioned and some videos on youtube but it didn't appear to me that they were using different color paletts (since they had more artefacts). Secondly, can it do 25 FPS? I saw some examples but it didn't look like 25 FPS (doesn't mean that it's not possible).
Streaming would certainly be great, as the size wouldn't be an issue anymore. I am using an Elbox FastATA 4000. I have some 4GB partitions on the hard disk, hence streaming it would be the way to go if it works fast enough.

[TroyWilkins]

I'm trying to find the link I found ages ago again, but this seems to be relevant. Doesn't appear to be running at 25FPS, but also appears to be a stock 7MHz CPU
[ Show youtube player ]

[emufan]

some time ago, there was introduced a HAM6/HAM8 player, avi4hv - just in case you missed that. (linux based converter: hvconvert)
this one features vid and sound, compared to iff-anims.
starting with this posting, you get some examples on how to prepare your video files - using ffmpeg ( framerate parameter "-r" )
HAM6 / HAM8 conversion finaly done with AVI4HV.EXE / AVI4AGA.EXE (win32 tools)
eg: AVI4HV.EXE video.avi
--> on the following "?" you have to enter the audio file: video.wav - next enter the output file: video.hv
the *.RUN files are the amiga player executables (on the command line, ensure you have no additional space after or infront of the video.hv name).
examples by skullscandle, abbalah & pandy71

@TroyWilkins: i think you were looking for AVI4HV

[pandy71]

ffmpeg can produce directly RGB444, additionally some CLUT can be created to improve HAM conversion.
Perhaps someone is able to add encoder for ANIM/CDXL to ffmpeg (currently ffmpeg support only decoding for CDXL and ANIM).
RAW video play out in Amiga is limited by RAM bandwidth and storage bandwidth.
Vampire and similar architecture accelerators can be capable to deliver 352x576 25fps performance.

[emufan]

AnimFX introduced a new IFF-Anim mode, video with sound in one file.
would be great, if we have this once as an encoder in ffmpeg - next to standard iff-anim/cdxl.

[movec]

Originally Posted by emufan

some time ago, there was introduced a HAM6/HAM8 player, avi4hv - just in case you missed that. (linux based converter: hvconvert)

I had it already on my hard disk, but I didn't get so far to actually use it But now that you mentioned it I gave it another try. I converted a HAM6 video with the linux version and played it on my Amiga.

To play the video (generated for 25 FPS) takes 4:00 minutes (instead of 3). This means it can read&display about 19 frames/s (320x200) from disk. In my video I used 320x251 - which would reduce the max frame rate further. However, it also handles sound - I am not clear how much time playing/reading the sound requires in addition to the graphics.

Even when considering that it is HAM6 (and not HAM8) it has many artifacts - I guess this converter is using only one color palette for the entire video. I will see if I get this working on Windows as well or do you know a linux version for the HAM8 version as well?

[movec]

Originally Posted by emufan

AnimFX introduced a new IFF-Anim mode, video with sound in one file.
would be great, if we have this once as an encoder in ffmpeg - next to standard iff-anim/cdxl.

Thanks, this looks interesting. I hadn't seen that one before.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by movec

Thanks, this looks interesting. I hadn't seen that one before.

this is really cool, but came a bit too late i guess.
the only program i know of producing such anims is Wavetracer.
you have to load some anim then you can add sound to it. not really that userfriendly but it works somehow

the quality of the resulting .hv anim depends on the avi done with ffmpeg. i'm not an expert on this, but some results on youtube are really good.

[movec]

Originally Posted by emufan

AnimFX introduced a new IFF-Anim mode, video with sound in one file.
would be great, if we have this once as an encoder in ffmpeg - next to standard iff-anim/cdxl.

Hi, so I made some progress with AnimFX. I can create sound anims (from anims+ffmpeg extracted PCM streams) now. Unfortunately AnimFX slows down after about 1.5 minutes of playing @ 25 FPS (from memory, no disk). It still plays, but slower. Mainactor plays the same anim without problems (skipping the sound). Hence it's really AnimFX. Any ideas?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by movec

Hello - this is my first posting in this forum. I hope it meets the interests here.Total ANIM7L file size is 290 MB. It takes 5 min to load the anim7L file into memory (from disk I get only about 12 FPS).
cheers,
Markus

Which file system do you use? Are you using standard IDE or a SCSI board?

If you are using the (very slow) FFS then switching to PFS3 will really help.

[emufan]

i had some problems with anims larger than ram size. i wrote down some wavetracer guide.
using BigAnimFX you can play those big anims from harddrive.
there is also a link to a java based peecee application, which is the successor of wavetracer.

you can test play my Still Alive iffsfx anim. it does play correct here.

#1) Moloch here on EAB wrote his own tool to build such iff sound anims. fantasia v1.0a.
i'm not sure if he will release it into the public. i wrote a pm, asking to make it public

[saimon69]

Want to be honest, for me best performance that can be obtained by an OCS/ECS A500 is around 12 to 15 FPS (depending if PAL or NTSC) and would focus on that; it was the speed i did my animations.

[emufan]

in the zone: fantasia_v1.0a_by.Moloch.EAB.lzx

usage:
fantasia anim sound dest

i cannot find the original description. IIRC soundfile has to be 22050 Hz 8 bit 8svx

to play the anim use AnimFX / BigAnimFX .

thanks moloch

[matthey]

The new version of RiVA can play most 320x240 25fps mpeg videos at full speed on my 68060@75MHz.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=85895
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...8&postcount=22

MPEG videos are much smaller than HAM8 videos.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by matthey

The new version of RiVA can play most 320x240 25fps mpeg videos at full speed on my 68060@75MHz.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=85895
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...8&postcount=22

MPEG videos are much smaller than HAM8 videos.

Hope some day Amiga will be able to play files like this:

http://www50.zippyshare.com/v/kSrphpSw/file.html
http://www50.zippyshare.com/v/8etHWfLa/file.html
http://www50.zippyshare.com/v/KbJjo6WK/file.html

btw MPEG1 encoding was 8 times slower than encoding h264 and it is lower quality...
All above files are encoded to be playable from floppy with hardware interface so overall bitrate not exceed 250kbps (so you can create megafloppy mountlist and use some floppy emulator) but quality is very high especially in case of h.264.
File INNA-SayItWithYourBody-ExclusiveOnlineVideo_ycgco_h264_.mkv is converted to 12.5fps (with motion compensation).
All files have applied antialiasing to improve quality.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by pandy71

btw MPEG1 encoding was 8 times slower than encoding h264 and it is lower quality...

MPEG-1 is an old standard which is not too heavy, offers moderate compression, has good audio quality (mp3 is MPEG-1 layer 3), is widely supported and doesn't have many legal liabilities. H.264 is the industry standard today with high compression and good quality but has legal hurdles. Ogg Theora has similar performance without the legal issues and is gaining support, especially on the internet.

Amiga users don't have as many options for video. MPEG-1 videos are small enough to reduce disk loading bandwidth requirements while being light enough for older CPUs. There are older codecs like Cinepak and Sorenson (can be in AVI or QT files and played with the fast MooVID/Action) for even slower CPUs (but needing higher disk bandwidth and more storage space). The following link shows an AVI being played in HAM8 mode.

[ Show youtube player ]

HAM8 offers some compression itself with a kind of hardware decompression on AGA machines but long videos made of HAM8 frames are going to be excessively large and impractical.