Amiga movies possible on stock OCS machine?

[ImmortalA1000]

I was watching a video of SymbOS running on an Amstrad CPC computer and it included quite an impressively smooth playback of a 4 colour movie clip of a conversion of the MP4/AVI clip of the Matrix Reloaded trailer.

Right here is my question, given this is possible on a damned Z80 machine with crap video hardware......is there any software that will make such an impressive task happen on the Amiga A1000 in KS/WB 1.3?

Here is what I would like my beloved machine to do, the mother of all future Amigas......

Take some either bespoke or standard IFF anim and play it back in 24 frames per second @ 320x256 resolution either in EHB or HAM6.

and then that lead me onto the next thought....OK so the A1200 and A600 have IDE interfaces built in and we all know it is possible to convert a similar 2.5" IDE PC/Mac laptop to use a Compact Flash card via an adaptor....but how would you do this on an A1000 or A500? OK so there was the ICD Novia internal hard drive kit for the A500 I remember this well, it allows you to put a laptop PATA IDE drive inside your machine with I think the interface coming on a board that goes in the 68000 CPU socket and the CPU piggybacking onto the board.

So IF you had an OCS/ECS Amiga with and ICD Novia (?) IDE interface installed and a fast 4gb CF card slotted into the IDE port AND you had an Anim file or Clarissa file would this baby be able to play such a file in such high colour depths?

Is there any way to do this without using a hard drive and massive 10mb memory expansion zorro board for an A500? How low can the colour resolution go without it being a waste of time and looking like an 8bit slideshow?

Your opinions are welcome fellow Amigans

[gary]

Even if they were very simple Ham6 animations I doubt that you could get such high frame rates (25fps) on a 7.xx mhz 68000 in a standard A1000. You would need to find a compromise between high colour depth, resolution, anim compression method used and high frame rates.

I converted a few AVI files to HAM6 format that was streamed along with sampled sound from the same drive to play video clips on an OCS Amiga500 and A590 hard drive as an 'attract mode' with the machine inside an arcade cabinet. I think I used 'Biganim' to stream it and an IFF sample streamer for the audio. The animation could only handle around 8 FPS for a 300x200 HAM6 Anim5 file, and 10 FPS for Anim7 format.

The playback frame rate would depend on how much action was involved in the animation. The clips were from some cartoons (Bugs Bunny vs Marvin the Martian, The final battle with the Bruton/Aurora robots from Astroboy, the Lego Raiders of the lost Ark/Starwars stop motion animation and some random 'Beanz Meanz Heinz (Get it Right!)' clips from the Goodies. The tricky part was getting the audio and video playback in sync as each was done by separate programs - after a lot of modifying I had it working 'good enough'.

Eventually I came across a 28mhz 68000 accelerator which improved performance dramatically (to about 19 FPS on average from memory).

If you have an Amiga 1000 with kickstart 1.3 and you could play CDXL HAM animations with audio (which were mainly for use with CDTV/CD32s) from a hard drive. You won't be able to achieve frame rates as high as 25fps without an accelerator but they're still impressive for a 7 mhz machine.

[Cammy]

Hey Gary, could you tell me which CDXL player we can use on 68000? The ones on Aminet won't work on my A600, yet work fine on the A1200 and CD32.

I've seen CDXL videos playing on CDTVs so I wonder what players they used.

[ImmortalA1000]

Yeh HAM6 would be a killer really, I seem to remember some coder at a show got a proprietory HAM6 animation coded to do about 12-5fps on a stock A2000?

The reason I mentioned the CF adaptor though (which sadly precludes pre A600 machines though) was because on a 'slow' little machine the improvement in useability by replacing the hard drive with a 7200rpm model was significant for Windows with less than the magic 256mb, so significant that before it would not play standard 700mb xvid/divx files but after replacement of drive it happily did so without dropping a frame.

The reason this came up is the Amstrad CPC using it's Z80 and no blitter was displaying something like 4 colours @ 320x200 in about 10fps whilst running a chiptune player and some other stuff at the same time.

I'm sure with a CF card, something like Clarissa SSA (super smooth animation) format and 32 colour frames with minimal dithering we could get something very good, if I had the equipment I would try it immediately.

I might have a play with this idea in WinUAE over xmas at least the terrabyte drives are massively fast and have a huge cache....better get converting on a suitable trailer to mess about with and work out how to record this for youtube haha

lol If I ever see that damned internal IDE interface for the A500 on ebay and a CPU socket fitting internal accelerator my bank balance is in big trouble

@Cammy I seem to remember Commodore making a big thing to the magazine reviewers of the CD32 machine that CDXL was 2-4x better on the CD32 than the CDTV (either frame rate or animated proportion of the screen) wasn't the CDTV quarter screen size only and about 15fps in Ham6?

*slow=slow running M$ bloatware...266mhz is NOT slow

[gary]

Originally Posted by Cammy

Hey Gary, could you tell me which CDXL player we can use on 68000? The ones on Aminet won't work on my A600, yet work fine on the A1200 and CD32.

I've seen CDXL videos playing on CDTVs so I wonder what players they used.

I think I ended up soft-kicking to KS2.x and using the player from the CD32 development kit.

[gary]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Yeh HAM6 would be a killer really, I seem to remember some coder at a show got a proprietory HAM6 animation coded to do about 12-5fps on a stock A2000?

That is probably because he wasn't using the Anim5 format which allows for better compression (smaller file size) but requires more CPU time to decompress and play the animation back. The Anim7 format requires less CPU but a larger file. I think the CDXL format had no compression.

The reason this came up is the Amstrad CPC using it's Z80 and no blitter was displaying something like 4 colours @ 320x200 in about 10fps whilst running a chiptune player and some other stuff at the same time.

Yes, and an A1000 running a 2/4/8/16 color anim would be OK depending on the animation+compression method. 32 colours and Ham6 would be more difficult but it can be done. I achieved around 10fps but forgot to mention that I had some fast RAM and softkicked to KS2.0 - but it was a 7mhz 68000 A2000.

I'm sure with a CF card, something like Clarissa SSA (super smooth animation) format and 32 colour frames with minimal dithering we could get something very good, if I had the equipment I would try it immediately.

I really doubt it unless you upgrade the 7mhz 68000 CPU. The hard drive speed is not the biggest problem - it is the CPU. I added a 28mhz 68000 accelerator to an Amiga 2000 while testing animation playback and the hard drive read/write increased dramatically. This was using an old A590 interface with a 100 meg scsci hard drive (not an 'XT' drive which may be too slow).

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gary

That is probably because he wasn't using the Anim5 format which allows for better compression (smaller file size) but requires more CPU time to decompress and play the animation back. The Anim7 format requires less CPU but a larger file. I think the CDXL format had no compression.


Yes, and an A1000 running a 2/4/8/16 color anim would be OK depending on the animation+compression method. 32 colours and Ham6 would be more difficult but it can be done. I achieved around 10fps but forgot to mention that I had some fast RAM and softkicked to KS2.0 - but it was a 7mhz 68000 A2000.



I really doubt it unless you upgrade the 7mhz 68000 CPU. The hard drive speed is not the biggest problem - it is the CPU. I added a 28mhz 68000 accelerator to an Amiga 2000 while testing animation playback and the hard drive read/write increased dramatically. This was using an old A590 interface with a 100 meg scsci hard drive (not an 'XT' drive which may be too slow).

What about if we did the old ST trick of just blitting single pictures into memory from a very fast CF card....then you need zero CPU time except to actually display an image in sequence and then the next.

[ImmortalA1000]

Is there an uncompressed format for the pictures we could use? Because if you increase the speed of the media to near 50% chipram speeds such as with a fast CF card solution the extra bytes loading will be less of an issue.

Could some really technical person do any timings for say how many cpu cycles it takes to load in a single 32 colour and 64 colour images of 320x256 resolution?

You need to read the data in sure...but what I am interested in is if in machine code you can even display single individual EHB or 32 colour images within 1/24th of a second. Some games obviously run @60hz and they are blitting a screens worth already no? So it stands to reason if you can get read speeds of uncompressed images down to 1/60th of a second so thats 320x256x5 or 320x256x6 bits/second transfer rate. Even at 320x256 bytes that is only a transfer rate of 640kb/second...way way below the maximum IDE interface speed even on an A600 surely....and there is no latency on CF cards either it's instant access.

Is the fact Amiga uses bitplane screen modes rather than half byte(nibble) or byte per pixel screen modes a problem there too?

I'm really not seeing why a 7mhz 68000 AND blitter with DMA transfer ability can't do it using single distinct images with no compression....it's not like 4Gb is not an insignificant amount of space to store the images on...and if the source is widescreen 16:9 you can drop to 320x200 or less too saving even more space.

[Cammy]

Using CDXL on the CD32, we can get a streaming movie at around 12fps (I think, I forget the exact framerate) in HAM6 and 256 colours with a resolution of 320x64, which is then stretched using the Copper chip to 320x128, which is around 16x9 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The CD32 is limited to around 300kb/s datarate, which is slower than what you can push through the IDE or PCMCIA ports with a decent drive. But then the CD32 has a 020, and I haven't found any CDXL players that work on 68000 to test if my experimental CDXL videos will work on the A600.

CDXL is an uncompressed, sustained-data-rate animation format that uses ILBM frames and 8SVX streaming audio.

[DyLucke]

Then i assume we could play a movie using a 020 if we could have the tool to conver that Mpeg4 to the native ILBM and 8SVX formats... Despite i think we would get a very heavy file.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I was watching a video of SymbOS running on an Amstrad CPC computer and it included quite an impressively smooth playback of a 4 colour movie clip of a conversion of the MP4/AVI clip of the Matrix Reloaded trailer.

Right here is my question, given this is possible on a damned Z80 machine with crap video hardware......is there any software that will make such an impressive task happen on the Amiga A1000 in KS/WB 1.3?

Here is what I would like my beloved machine to do, the mother of all future Amigas......

Take some either bespoke or standard IFF anim and play it back in 24 frames per second @ 320x256 resolution either in EHB or HAM6.

and then that lead me onto the next thought....OK so the A1200 and A600 have IDE interfaces built in and we all know it is possible to convert a similar 2.5" IDE PC/Mac laptop to use a Compact Flash card via an adaptor....but how would you do this on an A1000 or A500? OK so there was the ICD Novia internal hard drive kit for the A500 I remember this well, it allows you to put a laptop PATA IDE drive inside your machine with I think the interface coming on a board that goes in the 68000 CPU socket and the CPU piggybacking onto the board.

So IF you had an OCS/ECS Amiga with and ICD Novia (?) IDE interface installed and a fast 4gb CF card slotted into the IDE port AND you had an Anim file or Clarissa file would this baby be able to play such a file in such high colour depths?

Is there any way to do this without using a hard drive and massive 10mb memory expansion zorro board for an A500? How low can the colour resolution go without it being a waste of time and looking like an 8bit slideshow?

Your opinions are welcome fellow Amigans

You sure it wasn't one of these? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM_RpxHgh-A

Here are base specs, http://www.symbos.de/trex.htm

Apparently the core can run at up to 80 MHz now, http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

[DDNI]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF0is6B3_M

Filmed in May 2007 at the Upstate N.Y. Amiga User Group Meeting in Waterloo, N.Y. An Amiga 2000 plays back Ham images taken from an AVI file at 15 fps.

sorry not stock OCS, but interesting nonetheless.

[gulliver]

Well it should actually not be very difficult to create a video player with a better capability than the Symbos one. From the symbos website if you look at this picture you can get more details on the format they use:
http://www.symbos.de/gfx/shots/apps/...s-symplay2.gif

FPS:12
Colors: 4
Imgae size: 248x128
Datarate: 768kbit/s (96KB/s)
sound: unknown for me

So as you see it should be no problem whatsoever even for the slowest amiga with the deadest interface to mimic that format and reproduce it.
Of course there is lots of room for improvements on the quality area for an amiga version.
It should be a really nice project for an enterpreneur amiga developer to get a video player like that, and an encoder of course!

[ImmortalA1000]

CDXL 2 from CD32 probably wouldn't run on an A600 right?

Well there are two ways to do this. Compressed or uncompressed.

Taking uncompressed you are going to be hitting the throughput of the drive and A600's IDE interface or a Zorro side expansion unit's throughput. 40kb is the size of each image in 32 colours and 48k in ehb 64 colours, if you say 24fps then you get.... 40x24=983040kb per second. So you're going to need about 1mb per second like that.

But what is the maximum throughput in the Amiga system for streaming data in from IDE hard drives? That's the info I can't find reliably.


I can find drives and CF cards fast enough but how slow is the Amiga at taking onboard this data and putting it into memory locations to display? Blitting from RAM to RAM even 48kb x25 is no problem but latency and DMA could be an issue?

Also does anyone remember the program BigANIM (was a freebie on CU or AF and plays anims direct from hard disk)

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Photon

You sure it wasn't one of these? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM_RpxHgh-A

Here are base specs, http://www.symbos.de/trex.htm

Apparently the core can run at up to 80 MHz now, http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

No it was running on Caprice but setup as a real CPC6128 I think and not on that system set up. I know there is a 12mhz accelerator for the CPC which some also use. Obviously data transfer is much improved compared to even a CPC IDE interface kit though true.

[Photon]

Immy, well if you mean this is the clip you saw, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9S8DvimBdo

then it loads and decompresses 6KB data to 31K pixels in 1/12 second, with a <4 MHz Z80. While running SymbOS. Just thought it sounded a little too good to be true. But hell, if the SymbOS in the first YouTube vid I linked can even run on it, that alone is impressive

Probably not, you saw a clip from an emu?

[gulliver]

I was thinking ALL Amigas can probably cope with the following video format:

16 colors at 320x200 (NTSC low-res) with 15fps:
video: 320x200x4bitsx15fps = 3840000 bits/s
audio: 2channelx8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total datarate= aprox. 523 kB/s. Rounded up

Imagine an A1000 playing a movie with this resolution, it should be doable. Of course you could apply compression to save disk space with those open source already available XAD libraries.

[gulliver]

Amiga Video Format (AVF) - first draft - 16 nov 2009

Features:
Number of Colors 2,4,8,16,upto 32 (HAM8 and 16/32 bit modes are Not available for every Amiga, so NO)
FPS= 5,10,15,20,24,25 upto 30 max
Image size: maximum 320x200, 320x100, 160x200, 160x100, 160x50, 80x100, 80x50
Sound: max 8bit, 2 channel, 27429hz, min 8bit mono at 4410hz, also 8000hz and, 160000hz
Datarate: Should be a maximum that most interfaces can cope with it
Compression: File compression to save space and reduce bandwith at the cost of cpu usage based on open source publicly available compression formats on Amigas.

Philosophy:
The concept behind this format is that even a 1985 256kB kickstart 1.0 NTSC 7mhz 68000 Amiga maybe able to reproduce it without issues, provided the ide/scsi/whatever interface and its media can cope with the datarate performance wise.
This is most likely the limiting factor, not the cpu if adequate or no compression is chosen.
The advantage of the Amiga is that DMA and coprocessors can be used without affecting the cpu performance on playback.
It should be no problem to add HAM8, 16 and 32 bit modes, but then as said before will only run on few Amigas that have that hardware, the same applies to more framerate, image size, sound features. The point here, is that if you have great hardware and want better resolutions, then simply use another video format. This one is intended to be Amiga compatible pursuing the goal that any Amiga should be able to reproduce it, no matter if it is a 1985 unexpanded model.
The proposed format should be designed in a way that frame dropping, image and color reduction should be pretty easy and require very little cpu overhead from a video player program point of view.
Of course, with compression, at the cost of cpu overhead, you can reduce the disk interface clog and earn bandwith in the process, so that the most handicaped storage interfaces can cope with datarates. It is important however, to leave some little bandwith for housekeeping tasks, such as video&audio synchronization, subtitles, scenes selection, menus, and future improvements.

Datarate hipothesis (aproximates are rounded up on worst case scenario: no compression and highest paula sound quality):

32 colors 320x200:
video: 320x200x5bitsx30fps = 9600000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = aprox. 1.23 MB/s

32 colors 320x200:
video: 320x200x5bitsx25fps = 8000000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = 8438864 bits/s (aprox. 1.04 MB/s)

16 colors 320x200:
video: 320x200x4bitsx25fps = 6400000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = 6838864 bits/s (aprox. 835 kB/s)

8 colors at 320x200(NTSC low-res) with 30fps:
video: 320x200x3bitsx30fps = 5750000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = bits/s (aprox. 757 kB/s)

16 colors at 320x200 (NTSC low-res) with 20fps:
video: 320x200x4bitsx20fps = 5120000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = 5558864 bits/s (aprox. 679 kB/s)

32 colors at 320x200(NTSC low-res) with 15fps:
video: 320x200x5bitsx15fps = 4800000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = aprox. 640 kB/s

8 colors at 320x200(NTSC low-res) with 20fps:
video: 320x200x3bitsx20fps = 3840000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = aprox. 523 kB/s

16 colors at 320x200(NTSC low-res) with 15fps:
video: 320x200x4bitsx15fps = 3840000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = aprox. 523 kB/s

8 colors at 320x200(NTSC low-res) with 15fps:
video: 320x200x3bitsx15fps = 2880000 bits/s
audio: 2x8bitx27429hz = 438864 bits/s (aprox. 54kB/s)
Total = 3318864 bits/s (aprox. 406 kB/s)


by IFG 21:36

PS: I declare myself guilty of too much free time


-END OF DOC-

[Cammy]

Keep working on it! If you can write software to play decent video, we'll have so many uses for it in games and multimedia programs.

[ImmortalA1000]

I think EHB should be an option, all Ami's can do 6bpp and it's only 15% more data for 100% improvement in colour resolution.

I doubt the old Commodore MFM drives for the A500 HD expansion would be any good.....still does anyone know the actual transx rates for the A600 IDE?

[gulliver]

@ImmortalA1000

First:
Some early versions of the Amiga 1000 sold in the United States lacked the EHB video mode, so it is a no goer.

Second:
Old drives are slow, but Flash storage today is cheap and reliably fast!!!

Results in KB/s using flash storage media with its corresponding adapters:

A600, no Fastmem: 696
A600,Fastmem: 824
A600, no Fastmem, PCMCIA card reader: 1432
A500, 68000, Trumpcard 500 Pro, no Fastmem: 975
A500, 68040+32-bit Fastmem: 1837
A1200, no Fastmem, PCMCIA Squirrel: 330
A1200, no Fastmem, PCMCIA Surf Squirrel: 1000
A1200, 68030, no Fastmem: 1127
A1200, 68030+32-bit Fastmem: 1975
A4000, 68040+32-bit Fastmem: 2000

While flash storage is the most desirable media, further better results can be obtained with newer , highly specced flash cards. As an example i have tested a SDHC Class 4 card on an A1200 IDE port an obtained 2.5 MB/s performance. Of course, your mileage may vary, always applies. This tests are usefull only for having a general idea.

The tests also show how adding fastram or an accelerated cpu affects transfer speeds in a favourable way.

Note 1: with the following adapters you will gain this speed increase:
IDEFix Express adapter will double (x2) the bare IDE performance
FastATA adapter will quadruple (x4) the bare IDE performance

[DDNI]

Would anyone like the software used for the full screen and sound HAM video playback shown in the video that I posted? It was written by TJ of the Upper New York State Amiga Group. I have two videos that were suitably encoded, however, how that was done I don't know. Perhaps someone here can figure it out.

Edit.
Actually, I am in contact with the author. I will delay sharing this until he gives me permission to do so.

[gulliver]

@DDNI

I know how:
It says he showed video at 15fps
It says he used HAM on an A2000, so HAM6 it is.
It says the show was in NY, USA so probably used some NTSC image size

Then we do the math with little guessing:

Datarate 320x200x6bitx15fps= 704 KB/s rounded up

So, it is pretty doable, with, of course, the right storage media and its appropiate interface. You could even do it better!

[DDNI]

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

[gulliver]

Then please share it!

[DDNI]

Originally Posted by gulliver

Then please share it!

As I said, if he agrees to that then I will.

[DyLucke]

704 kbit or 704kbyte per sec?

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gulliver

@ImmortalA1000

First:
Some early versions of the Amiga 1000 sold in the United States lacked the EHB video mode, so it is a no goer.

I'm sorry but I don't agree, that's only true for the very first of the NTSC A1000 machines in the USA which might account for 0.001% of the total OCS/ECS Amigas ever sold so I don't think you can exclude it on that basis, even the original PAL A1000...with serial numbers in double figures have EHB so it should be included. EHB is the Amigas biggest strength...for palette swapping per frame it is far more effective than HAM mode and you get 100% increase in colour resolution. If it is not do-able because of the odd bitplane layout of Amiga screen memory then that is a valid reason, excluding it because two guys in the entire world might not be able to use it one just one of their Amigas is not

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gulliver

Old drives are slow, but Flash storage today is cheap and reliably fast!!!

Results in KB/s using flash storage media with its corresponding adapters:

A600, no Fastmem: 696
A600,Fastmem: 824
A600, no Fastmem, PCMCIA card reader: 1432
A500, 68000, Trumpcard 500 Pro, no Fastmem: 975
A500, 68040+32-bit Fastmem: 1837
A1200, no Fastmem, PCMCIA Squirrel: 330
A1200, no Fastmem, PCMCIA Surf Squirrel: 1000
A1200, 68030, no Fastmem: 1127
A1200, 68030+32-bit Fastmem: 1975
A4000, 68040+32-bit Fastmem: 2000

While flash storage is the most desirable media, further better results can be obtained with newer , highly specced flash cards. As an example i have tested a SDHC Class 4 card on an A1200 IDE port an obtained 2.5 MB/s performance. Of course, your mileage may vary, always applies. This tests are usefull only for having a general idea.

The tests also show how adding fastram or an accelerated cpu affects transfer speeds in a favourable way.

Note 1: with the following adapters you will gain this speed increase:
IDEFix Express adapter will double (x2) the bare IDE performance
FastATA adapter will quadruple (x4) the bare IDE performance

Thanks for all the comparisons When I say transfer speeds I was asking if anyone had the official Commodore specification for the transfer speed of the IDE bus on the A600 itself really, not in reality what different machines can do, although this gives you an idea of which setups will need changing... For example on an old PC the IDE on the motherboard may theoretically be about 10mb/s on that motherboard regardless of how fast the drive is...but some drives struggled to get 1mb/s in the early days etc etc.

Also FastRAM...isn't the A600 2mb ChipRAM so who ever made a non accelerated FastRAM card? I have a 2mb A600 I'm sure it is 2mb ChipRAM though.

I would guess more modern low power 5400/4200rpm drives of around 4-6gb which cost pennies now on ebay are what most people will put in their machines surely, if you choose to have a 40mb dinosaur from the early 90s then you have to accept you won't get optimal performance because your drive is slower than the throughput of the A600/A1200 IDE interface bus etc.

One thing I am very wary of is anything other than hard drive upgrades being considered....Amiga kit is so rare for OCS machines when it comes to ICD's internal IDE board for A500s or accelerators for the A600/A500/A1000/A2000 etc. However changing a drive to a nice efficient Fujitsu 6gb unit is no problem, the drives are dirt cheap...some people give them away they're worthless in the PC laptop business (think I had 30 last year used as paperweights haha) and CF>>IDE kits are non machine specific so it is cheap and easy again for people to upgrade their drives in this way.

Edit: And you can't exclude vertical resolutions of 256 for PAL machines as an option, otherwise there will be no full screen video on any PAL Amigas (which is where most Amigas were sold..outside the PC obsessed USA!!) and it will be a waste of time if only NTSC machines are perceived to have FMV but not PAL ones due to this omission.

[ImmortalA1000]

I wanted to keep this separate.

The PCMCIA throughput is very good on the A600 test there, but what are seek times like on CF/SD cards etc. SD is terrible for transferring/accessing tiny files.

Also are we going with decompress an anim format or blit whole blocks of uncompressed screen memory+1 palette info per frame?

Also that A2000 doing 15fps HAM...I thought it was reading an AVI file...so what is there to encode? Or do you mean what bitrate/resolution/codec settings are actually used for the 'AVI' file as AVI is just a wrapper and like saying something is just 'IFF' which is meaningless

[DDNI]

AVI files need to be converted to 15bit RGB 320 x 200 (216 max) with separate 8bit .wav sound (max 22hz). Then converted to HAM6 with sound movie file using the mentioned software.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gulliver

@DDNI

I know how:
It says he showed video at 15fps
It says he used HAM on an A2000, so HAM6 it is.
It says the show was in NY, USA so probably used some NTSC image size

Then we do the math with little guessing:

Datarate 320x200x6bitx15fps= 704 KB/s rounded up

So, it is pretty doable, with, of course, the right storage media and its appropiate interface. You could even do it better!

It's 48000 bits for 320x200 per 6 bitplane image (or 64000 for 256 colour AGA). so that's 46.875kb per HAM6/EHB frame uncompressed we are talking?

So 15fps on most old original drives is possible/close but 930kb/s is very achievable for a much more credible and pleasant 20FPS even with a standard £1 costing 6gb 2.5" IDE drive of decent quality in an A600 or A1200. And these are uncompressed sizes of individual frames+palette swap per frame so the 7mhz A500/600/1000/2000 should be fine with EHB and HAM6.

The real question after watching that video again is this...as the video being parsed is not an actual AVI after listening to what the guy is saying but a series of HAM6 images...is there actually enough grunt in the OCS chipset to pull a 48k bitmap data for the image from a fast medium...stick it in screen memory...and swap the palette colours?

I ask this because if this guy's routine is state of the art and still requires an accelerator to achieve 15fps then clearly there is not enough time to do this on a 7mhz OCS Amiga then right? Which is disappointing to say the least if you need an 030 just to do that. Surely there are OCS games which blit more than 48k of graphics every 1/25th of a second in total?

All that we need is some machine code routine to load each uncompressed frame, put into the display area as 6 bits as is and change the palette colours...so I guess what I am asking is what is the actual DMA bandwidth on an OCS Amiga to handle this...is 1mb/s not possible on an Amiga bus using Agnus to blit the data in..data that should be read in via DMA too?

Anyway I am glad I fired up all your imagination so far...see sometimes it is good to dream...impressive reality may come from this.

Also another thought....would it help if you load in seperate bitplanes and write them to the respective bitplane on an alternate double buffered screen?So while you are loading one segment of 8k per frame for bitplane 2 of frame 1 you can be writing via the blitter bitplane 1 data for frame 1 from the previous loaded data. Can you do this in DMA or will the blitter hog the DMA and prevent this working.

Because that is 6 writes per frame so for 15 frames so that's 90 separate operations in the OCS chipset to write 1 bitplane of data to screen memory. Personally HAM is a nightmare to compute from an AVI I bet, if you want it to look optimal it will need Digi-view quality of processing and optimisation for each frame. Stick to a dithered EHB screen per frame I think for testing the throughput of the OCS chipset.

[DDNI]

I just made a HAM6 movie of Big Bang theory Season 3 Episode 7.

15bit RGB 320x200 12FPS (PAL source) uncompressed .avi was 1,729,458KB. 8bit 16000hz .wav file of 35.1MB.

After conversion to HAM6 it is 684,410KB

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

930kb/s is very achievable for a much more credible and pleasant 20FPS

Yes, simply use NTSC so you can show one frame every three NTSC frames. For PAL 20 frames is annoying.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

is there actually enough grunt in the OCS chipset to pull a 48k bitmap data for the image from a fast medium...stick it in screen memory...and swap the palette colours?

Perhaps. If you have a DMA controlled HD then you might be able to have the controller put the read data into the right place in chipmem directly, ready to display. The blitter works at 2 MB per sec, I think. You only need two channels so that's 1 MB copy speed if I'm not mistaken. Palette swapping is a matter of changing 32 bytes worth of custom chip registers, which is no problem.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I ask this because if this guy's routine is state of the art and still requires an accelerator to achieve 15fps then clearly there is not enough time to do this on a 7mhz OCS Amiga then right?

Sounds like a bit much, but I can't say for sure. On an A1200 with 50MHZ '030 you could handle as much as 2.5 MB per sec.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

so I guess what I am asking is what is the actual DMA bandwidth on an OCS Amiga to handle this...is 1mb/s not possible on an Amiga bus using Agnus to blit the data in..data that should be read in via DMA too?

As said above the blitter can handle 2 MB per sec, which has to be divided over the channels you need (in this case two). If it's possible to have the HD controller DMA the data straight into any location in chipmem, then blitting probably isn't needed.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Also another thought....would it help if you load in seperate bitplanes and write them to the respective bitplane on an alternate double buffered screen?So while you are loading one segment of 8k per frame for bitplane 2 of frame 1 you can be writing via the blitter bitplane 1 data for frame 1 from the previous loaded data. Can you do this in DMA or will the blitter hog the DMA and prevent this working.

It really doesn't matter, as long as the buffer is filled up before displaying. If both HD DMA and blitter are needed, then this is going to become very difficult indeed.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Personally HAM is a nightmare to compute from an AVI I bet, if you want it to look optimal it will need Digi-view quality of processing and optimisation for each frame. Stick to a dithered EHB screen per frame I think for testing the throughput of the OCS chipset.

Because you have to convert each frame to a lower number of bits per pixel anyway, you need a batch conversion program for this. Because you need this, you might as well go for Ham6. The task has to be automated anyway, so you might as well go for the best quality.

[ImmortalA1000]

Great thanks for the info.

Is the IDE on the A600 DMA capable like you mention does anyone know? Or SCSI drives on Zorro I/II expansions as in the A500/1000/2000?

My only comment was that HAM is a unique Amiga problem as far its drawbacks go but then I don't have much recent experience in any Amiga targeted software that does image conversions etc. There are some fantastic tools for 16million--->64 colour images on PC but then again EHB is not just normal 64 colour palette so again same disadvantage.

[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.


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.


PAL screenmodes & support:

In an ideal world, PAL amigas should play PAL videos, and NTSC Amigas NTSC videos, but then, it is not an ideal world. So either the supplier of those video files generates two different versions, one for PAL users and another one for NTSC users or we just create a player capable of converting the formats back and forth between these standarts. While the last approach may seem the most reasonable one, an Amiga is doing much of an effort just playing the AVF, so convertion of formats it is not advisable.
My approach is the following one:
The screenmodes I described in the AVF are NTSC but can easily be adapted for full PAL use by any of the known popular methods, such as for example, adding blank lines. So in this case there is no image degradation, just not full use of the the entire screen height and a very small amount of processing power to generate blank lines to fill the screen.
I dont do it the other way round, because it means you either have to resize the image down, or cut the picture, which means either quite some cpu overhead or bad image quality due to image chopping.
Another thing against native PAL resolution sized videos is the fact that we will raise datarates even more.


Miscellaneous:

While many argue about the methods involved in actually displaying the images and its feasibility, i may suggest we leave this task for the developer, so that he/she may choose his/her own approach, as there are many ways of accomplishing the task.

@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.)

[DDNI]

I concur, fringing is definitely an issue on the HAM6 videos.

[DDNI]

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q491Z-vmbw

[cosmicfrog]

wow that looks nice ddni, hope non cartoon stuff looks as good too

[desiv]

Originally Posted by DDNI

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q491Z-vmbw

That video is NSFW btw...

Heads up..

desiv