VC/DC version 0.1a released.

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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by tekkaman1 »

I would like to try it when It's released. ^^
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

tekkaman1 wrote:I would like to try it when It's released. ^^
I'm still not sure when that will be but I think (or hope!) that it will be worth the wait. I'm working on some cool stuff. :wink:
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by Basil »

Can you add support for Russian language ?
Or make something like only Russian version ?
Be cause no one player on DC can read Russian file`s name ...
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Basil wrote:Can you add support for Russian language ?
Or make something like only Russian version ?
Be cause no one player on DC can read Russian file`s name ...
I don't know how I would go about adding such a feature. The filenames are drawn using the Dreamcast's BIOS font, and the sourcecode for the player is freely available to anyone who has the knowledge required to add the feature.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by Basil »

What`s the progress ? :?:
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Basil wrote:What`s the progress ? :?:
I worked on it a bit recently, but I broke something in the last test I compiled. I think I know what I broke, so when I get a chance to fix it I'll see if the features I tried to add actually work. Playback should be better than the last version, and I'm hoping to have stills and menus working (that's what I was doing when I broke the VCD functions).

I'm really busy with my job right now, so progress is slow but it's getting there.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by Shapyi »

I'm glad you are still working on this.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Nothing too noteworthy, but I posted a small news item on my homepage. I'm not really sure when a new version will be ready since the code is still pretty messy, but progress is being made.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by TheRedFox »

sounds very hopeful. i can't wait till it's released.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by Basil »

i can't wait till it's released.
Yeah . Me too .
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by TheRedFox »

I've noticed that later on in VCDs, the video starts getting really choppy in the current version (luckily the audio also gets choppy so it doesn't screw up the synchronization at all) i assume this is because the DC laser moves at the same speed regardless of the area of the cd it's reading, but i was wondering if anything is being done to ease the choppiness in this new version.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by patbier »

good to hear about you OneThirty8.
i really hope your project will achieve !
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

TheRedFox wrote:I've noticed that later on in VCDs, the video starts getting really choppy in the current version (luckily the audio also gets choppy so it doesn't screw up the synchronization at all) i assume this is because the DC laser moves at the same speed regardless of the area of the cd it's reading, but i was wondering if anything is being done to ease the choppiness in this new version.
I'm not sure exactly why that happens. I experienced something similar once on a VCD during the last couple minutes of playback, and I just cleaned out around the laser in my Dreamcast and that seemed to help. It could possibly be related to the horrible code I had used to keep track of framerate. It was really very horrible and caused the program to skip way too many frames, so it's not unimaginable that it could cause things to get progressively worse until the film is unwatchable. Playback should be much smoother in the next version because I totally rewrote the code that keeps track of framerate and synchronization. It's not as sophistocated as in many media players and I'll probably redo it again, but it works fairly well for now. What I'm working on right now is some code to expand/truncate the audio before sending it to the sound hardware if it drifts too far out of synch. That also seems to work fairly well, but I think there's a small function I might steal from xine that will actually resample the audio so it doesn't sound like it has been messed with. The last version stayed in synch because there wasn't much going on in the way of multi-threading, which is why it was also so choppy.

Another thing to note is that while the player does have some support for SVCD, one should not expect a standards-compliant SVCD to work very well. Those will definitely be choppy.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by TheRedFox »

That also sounds very promising, and I hope it'll fix my problem. either way, this is a wonderful program, so thank you a lot!
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Just another status update. Nothing to release yet. I still have a lot of stuff that I want to implement, but I will probably make a WIP release sometime soonish (if not in August, then probably September).

Here's what is wrong that I know of:
  • I'm thinking that I need to rethink my sound output code again. Although I do feel it works better than the 0.1a release, and is much better than the horrible 0.1 sound output module (seriously, what was I thinking back then?), it will occasionally stutter. I think it's a simple matter of not asking the sound hardware if it wants more sample data often enough, but I'm trying to figure out a decent solution.
  • The GUI is still not quite good enough.
  • Audio/video synch should be pretty good on VCD-quality films. The only issue that I'm really aware of there is that when the aforementioned audio hiccups occur, the sample data that has been decoded gets pushed back a bit due to the short period of repeated audio. It will pretty quickly drift back into synch.
Here is what will be new (that I can remember and find worth mentioning):
  • I stole a couple of functions from an old version of xine I happened to have in my home directory to handle resampling of audio when it drifts out of sync. It seems to do a pretty adequate job.
  • To go along with that, I have some pretty ugly-looking but almost-adequate a/v sync code. It still needs some work and could probably be done much more efficiently, but it's doing a pretty good job.
  • I believe that I mentioned that I was trying to add support for playback control (ie, menus and all that good stuff). There is some stuff I haven't tested (audio-only items, continuation segment play items, stuff like that) but most of that stuff should work well. I've figured a pretty adequate means of entering any of the remote control buttons that were described in the VCDImager source code, including numeric entries.
  • I believe I also mentioned that I didn't think I could get extended playback control to work. The difference between that and regular playback control would be hot-spots in the menu items. I was wrong--that's working too.
  • In order to get at the extended versions of the play sequence descriptor files, I had to be able to read the ISO-9660 filesystem in the first track of the CD, which I couldn't do with the standard ISO-9660 implementation in KOS. After a little head-scratching, I figured out how to make a modified version of this filesystem driver that will work with VCD (and only VCD, really). You should be able to browse your VCD and play the *.dat files, but I've screwed something up so these files end early. If I can figure out where the mistake is I will certainly fix it, but otherwise you'll want to be aware of this and just play your VCD as a VCD.
  • For good measure, I also created another modified version of fs_iso9660.c to allow you to play bin/cue VCD images. I didn't really want to bother parsing the cue sheet and figured an alternative means of finding track start points based on other information stored in a pre-defined location on the VCD, so the cue file isn't even needed.
  • There's an ugly settings menu. You can turn off PBC so your VCD will play in order from first chapter to last chapter and skip over any still images (pretty much the way VC/DC 0.1a plays a VCD), try downsampling the audio to see if some movie files will play back a bit better (they probably won't, but that's why that option is there)... stuff like that. There's not much in there, really.
  • I took Bero's sh4 version of the dct64 for mpglib from DCMovie Player. It works well.
  • I updated libmpeg2 to version 0.5.1, although I didn't bother updating libvo since the code I use (the DC video driver) obviously only changes when I change my code.
  • There's a theme template for DCDivX floating around somewhere. I used this basic design for the upcoming VC/DC GUI. The buttons aren't all the same as for DCDivX (playback buttons had to be mapped differently--fast-forward is now triggered with the analog stick, for example, so that the D-Pad can be used for navigation by chapter) but the menu buttons should be fairly similar.
I forget what else. It's been the last several weeks that I've been really working on this a lot, but I've been tinkering on and off since last year's release.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by patbier »

Great news !
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by Christuserloeser »

That does indeed sound awesome!


I got a feature request in regards to video playback: Would it possible to have an option to center the video in its native resolution ? so 320x240 videos are displayed in the center of the screen with the rest of the screen staying black.

Also, is there any advantage for performance when encoding in e.g. 640x284 or 512x228 ?
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Centering a 320x240 video at that resolution would mean that a lot of the screen would remain black, because I use a 640x480 screen. At some point, I should be able to support such a thing somehow. Handling of various aspect ratios is a pretty important feature that is missing from VC/DC, and this request pretty much seems to fall in line with that.

Resolution will make a difference. The more data that needs to be copied to the video hardware each frame, the more likely it is that you'll run into speed issues. If you're going to cut the resolution in half, I would suggest halving it the other way around--reduce the width to something like 352 and keep the height at 480 or so. Most decent decoders should display such a video correctly by stretching it back out as long as the video stream contains the correct aspect ratio information, and it should look better that way.
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by TheRedFox »

alright! sounding good so far! i can't wait till it's released
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Re: VC/DC version 0.1a released.

Post by OneThirty8 »

Nothing newsworthy. Just a 'still alive' message. Made some fixes to the video synchronization code (audio and video now synch to an external clock, rather than trying to synch audio to the video or not checking synch at all like the old versions of the player). I will be working on the GUI soon, after I finish cleaning up and testing the rest of the code. Maybe a few other things, but I'm still working and progress has been good so far.
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