Is There Actually a Good Movie Player?

[Arfeds]

ive been looking around a few places and tried out a few media players ive tested many and only found one that works (DCMedia Player) but still the audio lags on this one and it doesnt play wmv's that well can someone tell me where to get a good working media player to play .Mpg's and .Wmv's please

Thanks

[Meshuggah27]

Have you tried DCDivx yet?
I havent tried wmvs but im sure it plays .avi's with no sound or video lag

[BlackAura]

Of course none of them play WMVs. Microsoft never released the specifications to anyone, so how exactly do you expect anyone else to be able to implement a WMV decoder?

Decoders for WMV7 and WMV8 exist, but they're pretty much useless, because nobody uses them.

As for problems with MPEG files... Usually that's because the file is badly encoded (remember that it's running off a CD, not a hard drive - synchronisation problems will occur if the file isn't encoded properly), or it's simply too much for the Dreamcast to handle. It only has a 200MHz CPU, remember. That's enough for a 320x240 MPEG-1 video (which is actually what commercial games use), but anything significantly more than that is really asking for trouble.

[Arfeds]

well dcmedia player plays most wmv's

[Christuserloeser]

I like GypPlay, uDCDivX & DCDivX. Also DCPlaya is a fantastic media player, but I am not sure if it got DivX support yet.

[Chroma]

DCDivx + Virtualdub + Xvid binary + lame = win

Download DCDivx, burn to disk.

Download Virtualdub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) install it.
Google the 1.4c version if you want to use .wmv (more on this later) and .asf files.

Download Xvid I suggest Keopi's (http://www.koepi.org/) binary cause its SUPERIOR, install that too.

Download LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net/) cause its the dogs danglies for making MP3's, install that too.

Download whatever.avi you want.

MEDIA and the DREAMCAST (ie: Prequisite knowledge)
The Dreamcasts GD-Rom has a max speed of 12x resulting in a theoretical peak rate of 1,800kbps.
Its Super-h processor runs at only 200mhz. (not that thats comparable to an x86 CISC speed anyway but i might as well bandwaggon)

So you want to keep audio+video bitrate below that (bear in mind theres also error correction/misc data that eats up bytes on a disk too) if you can get your settings to 1024kbps then your on to a winner.

Now that your able to work around the limitations of the filestream the next thing to take into consideration is the raw power of the system.
Cpu's dont generaly like high resoloutions or framerates.

A stream can be divided into 2 components, resoloution and framerate.
Resoloution = the ammount of calculations rendered per frame.
Framerate = how many times per second it has to render each frame.
Low resoloution = blocky
Low framerate = stuttery
The same is also true of rates that are too high for a processor to deal with, sure each frame will look awsome but when you get a new one every 15 mins it defeats the purpose.
320x240 @25fps (pal) or 29.97(Ntsc) is doable, depending on how much is going on per scene makes a difference too, Anime for instance has a lot of frames the same and not too much motion to render so you can crank the values up some.
something with Vin Diesel however where s**t asplodes and theres stuff everywhere moving pretty fast... well you gotta downtune the encode to deal with that kind of stuff.

Its not really an exact science.

Audio is a major component of any media stream, it consits again of samplerate and resoloution, 96000hz 24bit 5.1channel audio sounds amazing but it comes at a cost.
In the dreamcasts case the cost will be a rejected disk.
This is the first place to sacrifice bits for more video quality.
22000 8bit mono sounds pretty sketchy but its guaranteed to be multiplexed properly, you can generaly get away with 16bit stereo with a little tweaking.

Encoding
Open Virtualdub, drag your file in, if you get a VBR warning just ignore it.
Click on the video tab, select full processing, select compression and chose XVID configuration = different for every source, you'll pick these settings up with experience and be able to judge the best quant and bitrate settings for each file you need.
For now just worry about bitrate.
Remember you want to balance this with the transfer rate, keeping in mind that youve got audio to add in and some misc internal stuff too.
Framerates are standard in avi/mpg files generaly you'll find a majority run at 29.97fps.

Now click on the video ftab again click filters and then add, if your video has borders then select null trnasform and crop them out (they only waste bits) and then add the resize filter, again start off @ 320x240 and work up till you figure out the magic ratio for the dreamcast.

Thats pretty much the video taken care of.

Audio.
Click on audio and select full processing, click on compression, set up lame to re-encode it to CBR mp3
VBR encodes are pretty common (variable bit rate) because they drop more bits at parts that are quiet or have less going on in them, this in return gives you a smaller filesize but at a cost of clockcycles, youve not got that many to play with on a dreamcast so your gonna need to make sure its CBR (Constant bitrate) Id set it to 22khz 16bit stereo as a starting point.

Thats you all set to convert your avi.

All you need to do now is click on file, save as whatever.avi and let it do its thing.

Once its done burn it to a disk (normal iso mode1) boot up DC Divx jam in your new disk and watch it.

A note on WMV
Xvid/Divx/Mpeg all share common threads, in simple terms they take a batch of frames, convert the first one into a keyframe (iframe in the case of mpeg)
This contains an entire picture (like a jpeg) they then take the next frame, compare it to the KEY/I frame and chop out all the bits that dont move.
They do this to frame 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9... 25...3245,3246... etc you get the picture, its progressively sampled meaning it goes from frame 1 to the last frame in a direct sequence like any sane codec would.

WMV isnt sane, ionfact its right off the map in this case.
It doesnt encode every frame, it has a nasty way of dropping frames to save space and replaying frames to fool people into thinking they have a complete file.
thing frame 1,2,6,7,6,5,7,5,8,20 etc its completely random (well its sequenced on the fly when the file is encoding) this means that the file doesnt have every frame and when you try to convert it the video file almost always ends up shorter than the audio file.
this means that things will get out of sync sooner or later (normaly sooner) and you will wind up with a total headache trying to demux, chop stretch and tweak audio before muxing it back in and finding out youve fixed a mere 5 mins before it all goes wrong again.

WMV is in a word garbage. save your sanity and basicly avoid being anywhere near the vicininty ofa WMV encode.