XCD: automatic media detection and licensing

[avig70]

Hello again

I have a P-III 550Mhz and it runs the MPEG4 films full screen with no problem on 800X600X32 so I'm not quite shure what you meen.

I've also ran it on P-III 450Mhz and it had a little problem so I guess thats as low as you can go as far as MHz are concerned.

And another thing why is the memory involved ?? arne't you supposed to write directly to the video adaptor ? I probebly didn't understand you.

Avig

[Gawen]

@AviG

I am not going to discuss your hardware and my project here with you. If you want to learn about the limitations of memory buses writing raw data to low level badly supported ports, take out your old HP calculator and calculate the limitations of a 100MHz 32 Bit memory bus transfering mixed datastreams in and audio and video datastreams out to sound hardware and the VESA interface. There will be a prototype in the next days and you are invited to optimize it, i will be happy to apply the speed patches you send me.

Again, thanks a lot for your interest.

Gawen

[Koepi]

Hm, 100MHz x 32 Bit doesn't sound too bad for me as this makes ~400MB/sec possible (100.000.000 x 4 Bytes).
Uncompressed video would need max (assuming 720x576 resolution) ~30MB/sec at 25fps, ~35MB/sec 30fps (once more assuming we have 24bit color depth which isn't necessarily the case with vesa fb, usually you have 16 bit color depth there).

Even if we pull up the resolution to 1024x768x24bit, it would result in ~56.25MB/sec at 25fps respectivly 67.5MB/sec at 30fps.

This doesn't seem to be the bottle neck

I just wanted to throw this in, and hell yeah, I know about wait-states and so on

Best regards,
Koepi

[avig70]

@Gawen

Didn't meen to upset you but...

Let me know where to discuss it and I'll go there.

It just seems like you're kernel might be initializing the CPU registers in the wrong way..

Thats all I wanted to say, and I'll be happy to take a look at the code and learn.

Thanks
Avig

[avih]

@avig70

gawen is still working. let him play with it, and whe'n he's minimally satisfied, i'm sure he'll post the work. you'll then be able to tweak it as much as u like. just let the man make some progress first

avi

[Gawen]

@ los dos avis

You may eat me, when the first prototype is ready! *g* I shouldnt post info about pre proto performance probs.

If it had to perform on only one I/O chipset and cpu, say Intel I81x and PIII, it would be easier, but i need DMA on all major chipsets, with PIO access FPS values tend to 5-10 frames/s. I stopped counting the kernel compiles last night and test on 3 PCs with different PCI/IDE bridges in parallel. Wish me luck!

@koepi

You are great in calculating the ideal case where no postprocessing is neccesary. Of cause, then it works. Divide by 2 for IRQ/WS overhead, add some streams for cd reading, resizing, colorspace conversion ... if done by different program units that communicate via memory bus ... , you run into a realtime performance prob. But do i have to explain this to an XviD team member?

[unplugged]

burning method:

1. load Nero
2. select File/Burn Image
3. load the BIN file (NOT CUE!)
4. select Mode 2
5. burn!

This has been reported to work even on problematic burners, where no other method have been successful.

To remember that this kind of binary CD images need the "famous" capability of RAW writing by the CD-R/RW writer unit...

Not much time ago there was been a lot of discussions about old and new burners regarding RAW writing support (entire sector... ECC EDC...), remember the first CloneCD launch era!!


about M2F2 interest:
Without discrediting XCD intentions and efforts, I have to add some thoughts derived from the M2F2 spuring concept too:
Why do not *also* consider a simpler "slick" version of XCD specifically oriented to host already-known file-systems (firstly CDFS), this to do a strict container based variant?
Describing the binary, simply a primitive layer with very little ID/Info header and a cluster structure with *only* EDC CRC-check embedded.
Just a quite RAW container to mount inside any needed standard filesystem (layer 2). With unique strategy to read problematic sectors by rereading at lower speeds , or simply rereading. (using cluster CRC data as triggering mechanism of course).
Just to have no overhead CDs not difficult to implement (small driver mount-engage filesystem routines), to contain media (stream) content that doesn't require high read speeds (no more than 4x-8x, 600-1200Kb/s) and mostly sequential reads.
You could quickly say that burning such kind of CDs is a jump in the dark... but mode 2 form 2 CDs are commonly readed differently by CD-ROM units, at lower speeds of course (more accurately), just after fresh insert.
Make a try with PlayStation CDs (M2F2 too) or Philips Video CDs by inserting these on home PC, typically CD-ROM unit rotation speed is identical as for ISO-CDs (40-50x) but if you test effective burst speeds the unit transfer is pretty close to 12x!!!
In most of cases (talking about CD-ROM units) these CDs are readed more carefully.
In fact, by experience make on fly copy of a M2F2 CD is a PAIN!!!


--------------------------------
http://www.elby.de
check if you have DAO-RAW or at least SAO-RAW.
Right?

[avih]

@unplugged:

thanx for the info and ideas.

we already think of read speed control. in fact we're just discussing it few mins ago on irc with matter and dext.

regarding the cd format: we want it as compatible as possible, so we chose the s/vcd paradigm since there are many players that can read such format already (as well as windows and linux). we're always open to new ideas though.

i must say i don't know much about cd formats (dext and koepi know much more than me regarding that). we can discuss different cd formats though if they have advantages.

thx again
avi

[spyder]

Does anyone here know the best way to get GCC working on Windows? I am looking for a version of GCC 2.96 or later(hopefully 3.0) with GCJ for Windows. I want to test my Java code compiled to native code that way. Since all I am using are base classes from JDK 1.3 (should be compatible with 1.1) my programs should work well with it. Maybe I could figure out a way to make a native CDXA MP3 player if I could compile my classes into a DLL and use it from VB(the only other Windows language I am good at).

[spyder]

To anyone who downloaded my modified JavaLayer app there was no manifest in the JAR for it to work correctly without unpacking so here is a fixed version. It works very well.

[Koepi]

@Gawen:

Guess what "I just wanted to throw this in, and hell yeah, I know about wait-states and so on" is supposed to mean.

Please read my mails correctly :P

Regs,
Koepi

[Belgabor]

@spyder
As I gather from the info on the mplayer homepage GCC 2.96 is a buggy RedHat patch to 2.95 and, again from that page, GCC 3.0.X is still buggy, too. So 2.95 would be the best thing to use. (admitted, they mostly worked for me on my linux box, but at least 2.96 has some issues with some progs. If I didnt fear totally messing my system, I'd try to downgrade)

Regards
Belgabor

[blixi]

Hmm I wouldn't trust all what the mplayer team says. I've compiled mplayer with the 2.96 a lot of times without problems...
Since the gcc3.0 is a littlebit older now than a few days there should be no problem. The only thing with the gcc3.0: he is a littlebit more accurate with interpreting ansi-c++, so then you write code that doesn't conform to ansi-c++ the new gcc is bailin out earlier..

blIxi

[nah]

Hello,

I've just update my GUI to use with the Mode2CDMaker 1.2pre from DeXT. I've modified the prg to take in account the source file name (don't know if it will bug the Image created but I've made some test with Deamon and CDRW on ogg, avi, mp3 files, and it seems OK). I've add a fixe entension to the files : .r, just to use corectly with my GUI.
The prgs are on my Web page : http://membres.lycos.fr/zorgzorg

A+

[Belgabor]

@blixi
That seems to depend on the options you use and on architecture. I had several versions or option combos which didnt compile with 2.96 but did with 3.0.2, others didnt compile with either (as I have no 2.95 I cant say if they'd have compiled anyhow though )

Regards
Belgabor

[oddball]

The only problem I can see with booting from CD and it auto playing the movie file (I'll assume movies will be it's main use here), is that if you have a TV out card you won't get TV out. You can view on the main monitor and that is all. Might be usefull for laptop users and those who don't pipe to TV though I guess.

[kappa]

Originally posted by oddball
The only problem I can see with booting from CD and it auto playing the movie file (I'll assume movies will be it's main use here), is that if you have a TV out card you won't get TV out. You can view on the main monitor and that is all. Might be usefull for laptop users and those who don't pipe to TV though I guess.

I have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro for the computer in my living room and it supports TV-out natively (even form the bios-bootup screen). I think all ATI cards behave similarly.

[oddball]

Yes. My Matrox G400 does the same I think with the correct enabling on the video cards BIOS. I think I tend to get probs in the mode booting back into Windows with it switching to 50Hz and having to manually switch it back in display properties from what I remember of trying it before. Not tried with more recent drivers however.

[avig70]

@nah

You have a small bug.

You treat shortcuts as if they were files and you put them in the files pane instead of treating them like folders and to be able to double click on them and go to the directory needed.

Also its not possible ot mark a few files at once and if the filesize is too small then a message box shows up and tells that the file is too small in some language that I don't recognize.

And a few suggestions:

1.) I think you should add some description near the panes themselfs to make the program more intuitive.

2.) Make the folder pane on the left side of the window and the file pane on the right side.

3.) Make a browse botton where ever you want us to find files or folders, I don't meen to impliment a file explorer like you did for the "list of files" but to make a small botton in the end of every line.

I've added a picture to ilustrate the changes. Here is a link ftp://ftp.ecitele.com/pub/Avig/untitled2.jpg

Avi

[DeXT]

For those interested, today I've released the 1.2pre2 version of mode2cdmaker. Still in preview state because I've not added Form1 stuff yet, but you'll find a couple of neat features:

* progress & speed counter
* optional long file names support (ISO-9660 Level 2, though)

Apart from this there are some bugfixes, too (not very important, though) and small XA compatibility improvements.

Thanks to the tests made by MaTTeR tonight, finally one of his DVD drives was able to read Mode2 CDs. I've not included the new format yet since this will require a change in the DSF in order to read it so I'll wait to the next filter release, which avih is working on now.

Oh and about the long filenames feature, to use it just add a -l option to the command line. The file names will be converted to ISO-9660 Level 2 (i.e. all uppercase, and no spaces), and the last file extension will be replaced bythe default M2F2 extension. As an example:

mode2cdmaker "d:\movies\this is my movie.avi" -l

The movie would appear as: THIS_IS_MY_MOVIE.DAT

This is mostly a "play" feature, remember that in XCD it's very likely that only Level 1 file names are being allowed, at least until we add Joliet support.

webs.ono.com/de_xt

(you'll have to wait for the server cache to update)