Sony AVC sample

[bond]

as some might already know Sony's PSP supports AVC playback

now it seems that this doesnt work from .mp4 (as for AAC and MPEG-4 part2 video from the Memory Stick), but from the ".pmf" format

the .pmf format seemed to be a proprieatary container developed by sony, but now showed itself to be simply .mpg (mpeg-ps)

therefore if you wanna have a look at an avc stream from sony
1) grab the following pmf sample file
2) extract the video from it with mplayer via

mplayer -dumpvideo -dumpfile raw.264 icon1.pmf

3) play it with mplayer or run the h264_parse tool from mpeg4ip on it to analyse it

the stream (300 frames) uses CABAC, Access Unit Delimiters (as mandatory for .mpg files), no B-Frames, no Deblocking, and no multiple reference frames

the stream is full of buffering_period and pic_timing SEI, which maybe should make the decoding easier?

the stream seems to be problematic because it uses different PPS every keyframe (pic_init_qp_minus26 changes in every PPS), which can bork at least the libavcodec/ffmpeg decoder (as used in videolan, mplayer or ffdshow) when placing the stream in .mp4 (with either mp4box or mp4creator)
is it allowed to have varying PPS every keyframe?

[JohnV]

Can you play .pmf from a memory stick, and can you create this kind of avc stream which works from memory stick with a non-sony AVC-encoder which puts the stream to mpeg-ps?

[godhead]

JohnV,

I attempted to play a .pmf from the memory stick but it wasn't recognized. I'm assuming this is something UMD only. I'm really starting to think the UMD's have an AVC playback app that runs. I doubt there's anything more than MPEG4 SP support in the OS. This is just a guess right now, but maybe more can be found when they start looking at the UMD movie file dumps.

[unixfs]

That sample doesn't contain a PSM, that is needed to qualify the codec
used (AVC in this case), missing which the default is MPEG2, so mplayer/vlc/tcvp can't play the samples unless you dump video.
Do you have any other sample?
It's ironic that the directory is called PSMC
I could fix mplayer's demuxer with a specific parameter, but it would be
really bad.
Someone should warn Sony to implement the standard properly, not
only part of it.

[bond]

Originally posted by unixfs
[B]That sample doesn't contain a PSM, that is needed to qualify the codec
used (AVC in this case), missing which the default is MPEG2, so mplayer/vlc/tcvp can't play the samples unless you dump video.

any other things that make .pmf different from normal .mpg?

Do you have any other sample?

here and here

Someone should warn Sony to implement the standard properly, not
only part of it.

i doubt sony gives a damn. afterall the files are called .pmf and are therefore not meant to be fully spec compliant

[unixfs]

thanks for those samples.

There are funny, bad and mysterious things:
- the video stream doesn't seems to contain VUI messages and/or framerate informations (so you have to specify -fps xx when playing the stream with mplayer)
- audio is stored as private1 stream with substream id = 0; from the dump
I couldn't identify the format/codec used, but I have the feeling (I'm afraid) it is AAC in raw payload format (without ADTS headers);
in this case it's next to impossible to decode if you don't identify
the configurator
- there is a private2 stream that contains hundred of bytes every now and then; to me it seems way too long to contain AAC headers

Do you know anything more precise or a link to a specification?

[bond]

the audio is sony's proprieatary atrac3 format pretty sure

is it stored correctly as "private stream"?

[unixfs]

syntactally yes, but using a substream id == 0 doesn't make much sense

[digigami]

Originally Posted by unixfs

syntactally yes, but using a substream id == 0 doesn't make much sense

I would have to double check the ISO documents, but I think substream_id was a concept introduced by the VOB and is not part of the regular MPEG-2 PS specification. To be more specific - since it's not a VOB, the first data byte would not necessarily be part of any header.

[eb]

I can demux and play video from this first short sample E0 stream.
Audio is BF private stream but not playable for me.
Another 2 long samples nothing can do with them.
Picture from short sample

[digigami]

http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=7679

Sony Announce UMD Composer For UMD Video Creation

Sony Computer Entertainnment Japan have announced some new UMD video authoring software called UMD composer. It allows developers to create UMD discs images and will set you back a cool 215,000 yen, or less dauntingly approximately $2000 USD!

After demuxing and looking at some UMD titles I had pretty much determined they were encoded at 720x480 and also, some short sections were interlaced! I think we will know the rest soon enough.