Tools for using Anim SLA format (supports sync'd audio like CDXL)

[ImmortalA1000]

The last update to the ANIM format, I think by EA in Dpaint 5, was an addition that allowed FMV because you had the option to stream the animation with sync'd audio as an option.

I asked this about a decade ago now probably, I am hoping somebody somewhere has some info about tools/apps that would allow me to create such an Anim myself.

(sorry if this in the wrong section)

[bni]

I have been messing around with creating ANIMs from modern gifs, and I have a workflow setup for that. I have been thinking about having sound for it would be cool, but I don't have any knowledge about it, sorry.

Im sure you know about https://www.sundin.nu/amiga/ BuildAnim doesn't support sound but source is available so maybe someone dedicated enough could add support for it if any specs for these kinds of files still exists.

[bni]

Also found this: https://github.com/stevelord/umadapple

[ImmortalA1000]

Thanks bni, it's only Anim SLA format EA created for Dpaint 5 I. can use, no point having video clips without synchronised sound. Was just curious to see what it could do with CDTV's 150kb/s vs CDXL.

I think there was a command line based tool I found (Linux I think) that supported the format but it wasn't a tool for creating them. It's been a decade and a half I think.

Problem is Amiga was forgotten by the time Dpaint 5 would have taken over. Somewhere I have a full retail disk copy and maybe there is some technical info on using it with Dpaint 5, perhaps the stand alone anim player uses it.

I used to create movie clips using Vlab and Dpaint 4 HAM animations on my Amiga 2000HD via the IFR realtime capture option I think.

[pandy71]

Key to sync audio and video is to use proper audio sampling rate - commonly, also on this forum you can see lot of people that don't care that Amiga can't set arbitrary sample rate, commonly you can see people converting audio to for example 22050 sample rate where there is no possibility to set such sample rate in Amiga - audio is played with different sample rate (slower or faster) and quickly desync with video.
So my strong advice is to use Amiga sample rates not PC or CD or DAT or other standard sample rates.

Also there is no easy way to convert sample rate for Amiga as most of commonly available (all?) sample rate converters will not allow to use fractional accuracy for sample rate conversion - for example closest sample rate to PC 22050 on Amiga is 22030.4037267081Hz.

Workaround is to upsample first to 3546895Hz, apply proper low pass filter (to prevent aliasing) and later decimate to Amiga sample rate (i.e. discard 160 from 161 samples - yes, brute force but should work with any sample rate converter).

Wouldn't be nice if someone write such sample rate converter (perhaps using SoX as core)...?

(all above numbers for PAL Amiga)

[ImmortalA1000]

Which is why I want to see what EA created in Dpaint 5 Anim+SLA format. One option is to read in a chunk of video data and then audio data interleaved and just alternate, same as any video player did since VideoCD era of download piracy. Doesn't matter if you are reading in key frame + delta frame for an amiga anim format or however AVI was doing it later for decoding frames from MPEG1 stream.

It's something only a genius with expert machine code on Amiga could experiment with on OCS hence I was trying to find a tool for this format EA created to test it's possibilities.

[pandy71]

How difficult will be to support Matroska on Amiga? Not sure about container overhead but... ANIM even with SOUND may still be unable to properly deal with HQ video playout on Amiga - perhaps this was reason why ProDAD designed SSA (IFF-SSA)?

[ImmortalA1000]

The Amiga chipset as we know it was born at the end of 1984 I think (hardware vectors for blitter update by Dave Needle).

This is an era where there was never a need to shift tens of megabits per second except for corporate sized RAID striped data servers. On the ST the speed reading in 16 colour pictures from hard disk to make anims by displaying them in rapid succession was balanced between reading data in and the manipulating it....on Amiga the i/o is always the bottleneck. If you play Anims from RAM the Amiga 1000 base spec is impressive even compared to FLI/FLV players on ISA 486 PCs....and those 486 PCs are from the era of Amiga 4000/040 launch!

Today I suspect modern Amiga accelerators (Vampire?) have very fast I/O speeds directly into onboard 32bit Fast RAM (even on OCS/ECS compatible modern accelerators) but back then you were in real trouble if you got the crappy original Commodore official A500 hard drive add-on, some PC 5150 spec clunky MFM physical drive with horrendous seek times to read in anims.

CU Amiga/Amiga Format gave away a program called BIG Anim, which played anims direct from hard disk but it didn't support any kind of audio. The EA format was probably defined on the off-chance Commodore didn't self implode into oblivion as it was always missing from the system defined formats. Was curious to see what you could have done with Dpaint 5 + Amiga 4000/030 back then.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

On the ST the speed reading in 16 colour pictures from hard disk to make anims by displaying them in rapid succession was balanced between reading data in and the manipulating it....on Amiga the i/o is always the bottleneck.

I/O on Amiga and ST are on same level - there is no substantial differences between those two in terms of the available bandwidth. Main difference is that ST has only CPU active on bus (and display reading from memory during video access) where Amiga share bus between additional HW capable to perform both, Read and Write cycles so CPU sometimes may act with lower priority (this is only in CHIP RAM so up to 2 MiB address space).

You can do rapid 16 color transfer from HDD to CHIP RAM (especially if your HDD use DMA so transfer is single cycle).

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by pandy71

I/O on Amiga and ST are on same level - there is no substantial differences between those two in terms of the available bandwidth. Main difference is that ST has only CPU active on bus (and display reading from memory during video access) where Amiga share bus between additional HW capable to perform both, Read and Write cycles so CPU sometimes may act with lower priority (this is only in CHIP RAM so up to 2 MiB address space).

You can do rapid 16 color transfer from HDD to CHIP RAM (especially if your HDD use DMA so transfer is single cycle).

Amiga can display 400% more information on screen in the same 16 colours than the ST, that's why I meant it's more of a bottleneck for the Amiga. Reading in compressed 16 colour images in succession is not too bad on the ST from what I saw back then at the user groups in 1986 era, reading in 6 bitplane images with 25% higher vertical resolution on top (32k vs 48kb?) for low resolution PAL Amiga displays is more of a shortfall vs potential of what Amiga can display as an animation. ST animations pushed through an Amiga is a waste of my time and the waste of the product lifespan of my beloved Amiga 1000s etc

Atari DMA port is essentially a bastardisation of SCSI and is indeed not bad at all. mid 1980s HDD mechanisms are just not capable of streaming animations Amiga chipset+CPU combo is capable of displaying via RAM, the shortfall for the Amiga is massive and so to make large streaming anims it is a bigger bottleneck on potential.

With some modern accelerators with onboard IDE/SD interfaces and 32bit Fast RAM you can get really nice results that are simply not the same as clunky old MFM units early ST/Amiga hard drives used regardless how much CPU/RAM you put in. Just a sign of how hard Amiga pushed every aspect of tech back then, until the time when Commodore had all but folded there was no printer capable of printing pictures from a 1985 Amiga 1000, like dye-sublimation printers like the Fargo unit etc costing thousands. Even then you are talking half the price of a brand new top of the range 1985 BMW and a decade wait to get printouts that look like what you see on your 1985 Amiga screen.

Imagine if early MP3 players turned up a few years early BUT were limited to 8mb memory storage and read speeds only allowing 32kbps streamed MP3 playback even though the actual MP3 decoders could manage 256kbps via internal 256kb cache RAM.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Amiga can display 400% more information on screen in the same 16 colours than the ST, that's why I meant it's more of a bottleneck for the Amiga. Reading in compressed 16 colour images in succession is not too bad on the ST from what I saw back then at the user groups in 1986 era, reading in 6 bitplane images with 25% higher vertical resolution on top (32k vs 48kb?) for low resolution PAL Amiga displays is more of a shortfall vs potential of what Amiga can display as an animation. ST animations pushed through an Amiga is a waste of my time and the waste of the product lifespan of my beloved Amiga 1000s etc

Nope, 400%? highest Atari res screen is 640x400 but with 71Hz non interlace refresh - this mean not so much difference between memory bandwidth used for graphics in Amiga and ST, also Amiga is capable to recreate Atari ST screen (for sure with ECS/AGA in HW and on OCS/ICS with some software tricks).
Issue with Atari is that they need two monitors to deal with screen and graphic HW is inflexible and primitive (it is not substantially better than CGA or similar designs with MC6845).

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Atari DMA port is essentially a bastardisation of SCSI and is indeed not bad at all. mid 1980s HDD mechanisms are just not capable of streaming animations Amiga chipset+CPU combo is capable of displaying via RAM, the shortfall for the Amiga is massive and so to make large streaming anims it is a bigger bottleneck on potential.

No personal experience with ST on my side so it will be difficult to comment - i know that Atari ST DMA port is not particularly fast I/O but IMHO it is provided by standard so still better than nothing.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

With some modern accelerators with onboard IDE/SD interfaces and 32bit Fast RAM you can get really nice results that are simply not the same as clunky old MFM units early ST/Amiga hard drives used regardless how much CPU/RAM you put in. Just a sign of how hard Amiga pushed every aspect of tech back then, until the time when Commodore had all but folded there was no printer capable of printing pictures from a 1985 Amiga 1000, like dye-sublimation printers like the Fargo unit etc costing thousands. Even then you are talking half the price of a brand new top of the range 1985 BMW and a decade wait to get printouts that look like what you see on your 1985 Amiga screen.

For sure we have technological progress but still we don't have perfect Amiga emulation despite so much effort...

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Imagine if early MP3 players turned up a few years early BUT were limited to 8mb memory storage and read speeds only allowing 32kbps streamed MP3 playback even though the actual MP3 decoders could manage 256kbps via internal 256kb cache RAM.

But this is more or less what we could experience 25 years ago - i have still in car Pioneer unit with hard disk and CD audio disc are ripped to some form of ATRAC encoded audio so they can be accessible later - have no heart to replace this as it still works and i don't like to throw working things and if they broke then in first place trying them to repair - as engineer i don't like to waste...