VLC Media Player

The only thing I really want to touch on is this:

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crt's can't be sharper than lcd's since they only support dvd-resolutions, while lcd's support a up to 5 times higher resolution.

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CRT's are inherently sharper; LCD is just the main technology used in HDTV construction because most people who want an HDTV want a massive (40~60") TV, which would be even more massive with CRT. There exist some CRT TV's that support HD resolutions, and CRT monitors have been, again, doing what HDTV is doing for years. While VGA is an analog standard, when you can make out individual pixels at high resolution, it's close enough to digital that it doesn't really matter. As for color gamut, nobody but a graphics designer needs the entire Adobe color space. There is no inherent difference between DVI and VGA in the PC world. Remember, Digital isn't the ultimate way of doing things; Analog is still very much suited to many tasks. Why this is such a fixation in this issue is beyond me, though.

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Originally Posted by Runefox

The only thing I really want to touch on is this:

CRT's are inherently sharper

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well, my lcd would prove you wrong. you don't give out any reason for your opinion, so what gives?

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Originally Posted by Runefox

While VGA is an analog standard, when you can make out individual pixels at high resolution, it's close enough to digital that it doesn't really matter.

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for showing windows screens that is, but not for movies. again, i speak out of experience...before i actually saw the difference i thought just like you. when i tested out some hq-encodes the difference was remarkable...this might as well might differ from brand to brand

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Originally Posted by Runefox

As for color gamut, nobody but a graphics designer needs the entire Adobe color space.

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that wasn't the point. you said crt's show a more natural picture than digital displays. i only mentioned the eizo cg220 that supports that color space to prove you wrong.

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Originally Posted by Runefox

There is no inherent difference between DVI and VGA in the PC world.

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thats true

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Originally Posted by Runefox

Remember, Digital isn't the ultimate way of doing things; Analog is still very much suited to many tasks. Why this is such a fixation in this issue is beyond me, though.

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yeah, analog is still pretty common. this fixation as you call it is explained easily :P

so let's sum this whole mess up: it's all about the reasons as to why someone should make a player as you suggested. while this would be quite nice, it also would be quite useless except for few people.
to get back to your example that everything would be useless then: programmers are human beings. you say they should do it just because they can. well they could, but let's face it: only the fewest would make a program without using it themselfes.
it's also more comfortable to use an external player than to first boot the player and then swap the discs.


so why make an emulator then, but not a media player? as i said: media players are widely available and offer a much better quality than the dc ever could. thats why i chipped in with mentioning hd and that the dc could never conquer that, while a cheap a$$ dvd-player can do that. as for emulators, there are no standalone emulators out there...just the homebrewn stuff from few people. so wrinting these makes perfect sense, because people would actually use that - and they do. you can see that in forums...the emulator scene is quite alive, even for the oldest systems, but no one asks vor picture viewers, or mp3-players (both of them could run perfectly on dc and the few that are available are already quite aged compared to standalone mp3-players), or movie players.

next point is, that the dc has the potential to run most emulated games at full speed, while you most likely would have to accept flaws when playing back hq-video content.

i hope that sheds some light in this discussion ;)

well, regarding the newest player by OneThirty8, may be he can push things the limits to what you would like to see


Edit: how about making a poll? would be interesting to see, if people would really prefere the dc to play movies.


one point i forgot: the drive of the dc seems to wear out quite often. i'm not so sure about this, but reading through forums i realized that many people have dc's with dead gd-roms. so i'd rather use it just for gaming

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Originally Posted by Xiaopang

but apart from all that discussion, i'd like to hear the opinion of a real coder whether or not this whole project would work or not

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I realize this is an old thread, but I just noticed it and I'd offer my two cents for any who may still be interested.

To the best of my knowledge, the PVR in the Dreamcast does not decode MPEG video. If it has that capability, I haven't seen anything in KOS to make use of that functionality. VC/DC uses libmpeg2 to decode MPEG video, as does la Cible's lvfdc, and I believe bero's DC Movie Player or VCD player uses it as well. I make use of the PVR to display the video after decoding it, but the only thing "accelerated" is the resizing of the video--no matter what the resolution of the file is, it's displayed at 640x480.

Audio decoding also takes time. That's why DCDivX really doesn't work (or, at least not well) with a sampling frequency above 22,050 Hz for stereo audio.

As for DCDivX, I've played with the beta 4 source code a bit, and it also uses the PVR to scale the image to the size of your TV set. One thing that might make it a tad faster is to draw to an offscreen buffer and then copy the data to the PVR using store queues as VC/DC does. What it does is allocate memory on the video hardware and write to that buffer directly, which is slow. Other than that, you're not going to improve the rendering speed of DCDivX.

thanks for that very informative answer :)

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Originally Posted by OneThirty8

I realize this is an old thread, but I just noticed it and I'd offer my two cents for any who may still be interested.

To the best of my knowledge, the PVR in the Dreamcast does not decode MPEG video. If it has that capability, I haven't seen anything in KOS to make use of that functionality. VC/DC uses libmpeg2 to decode MPEG video, as does la Cible's lvfdc, and I believe bero's DC Movie Player or VCD player uses it as well. I make use of the PVR to display the video after decoding it, but the only thing "accelerated" is the resizing of the video--no matter what the resolution of the file is, it's displayed at 640x480.

Audio decoding also takes time. That's why DCDivX really doesn't work (or, at least not well) with a sampling frequency above 22,050 Hz for stereo audio.

As for DCDivX, I've played with the beta 4 source code a bit, and it also uses the PVR to scale the image to the size of your TV set. One thing that might make it a tad faster is to draw to an offscreen buffer and then copy the data to the PVR using store queues as VC/DC does. What it does is allocate memory on the video hardware and write to that buffer directly, which is slow. Other than that, you're not going to improve the rendering speed of DCDivX.

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About VC/DC - did you check out the tools bero made for converting ADX sound to WAV (for SFD files which the audio is ADX) I linked to in your VC/DC thread?

I haven't really had a chance to look into it, but I've thought about it. I may try to add that at some point, or I might not. School is back in session now, so I don't know how much time I'll have to work on that stuff. My main concerns right now are making sure that Wolf3D still compiles so I can upload the source to Storm! Stuidos, and figuring out some sort of buffering system for VC/DC so the sound will stop skipping. Other than that, I'll probably be spending the next four months trying to keep my grades up.

Runefox i'm glad someone still enjoys the dreamcast but the scene is dieing. no ones motivated no one encourages new coders or anything. this is a very possible project though lcd does support higher resolutions than vga which is just a modified rgb that's less blurry. most signals transmit in 320x480 still some higher quality wouldn't be to bad but audio would be the killing point in the downsampling. it can all be done that's for sure and it would be pretty hard but it's plausible to say the best i can say but i doubt anyones gonna do it

-coming from an amatuer coder that just uses clever coding tricks and lots of algorithyms to get by in coding.