make a DC DVD addon?

[jvilla1983]

Just a suggestion, but wouldnt it be better if someone had ported an x.264 codec to the dreamcast and than had movies run off of that? With sound, i'm able to compress with decent video quality down to about 600 megs for a 2 hour movie (Lord of the Rings; Fellowship of the Ring SE: disc 1).


or.. you could just buy a dvd player and save a lot of needless trouble. =-)


Actually, instead of daisy chaining a bunch of systems for the use of the hard disc, what someone needs to do is create a USB interface that works with the Dreamcast. It would be a hard feat, but if it was created, the possibilities would be endless with what could be created for it.

[dcdood]

i had a small theory: If DVD Supports GD-ROM, replace the drive, Dreamcast should accept it.

another one was, i heard of a moddified IDE Port or something. google it, make a external casing containing a DVD-ROM Drive. (im not sure if possible but) Use Linux on a DreamCast, to Read the DVD Drive. and use KOS to simultaniously work with linux to Access the DVD Drive and load external homebrew from the Drive.
(this may not even work, but it's a thought. you would really need to know Linux, Dreamcast's Limits)

[Masta-G]

I dont think the dreamcast is powerful enough to process MPEG2 video used on dvds, let alone DTS/Dolbu Digital 5.1
It would be easy to hook up some drive to the modem interface or something, but dont count on watching movies.

[OneThirty8]

I dont think the dreamcast is powerful enough to process MPEG2 video used on dvds, let alone DTS/Dolbu Digital 5.1
It would be easy to hook up some drive to the modem interface or something, but dont count on watching movies.

It's probably not powerful enough to decode and display DVD-resolution video fast enough to produce a watchable result. My guess would be that those audio formats might actually present less of a problem. I'm pretty sure that KOS currently supports more than one streaming stereo audio channel. Hacking something together to convert the rear-channel stuff to a 'Pro-Logic rear channel' wouldn't really take that much work, and the center channel could either be a mono streaming channel or mixed with the left and right channels. Downmixing would take some time obviously, but not nearly as much time as we'd be talking about to decode and display DVD-quality video. In fact, displaying the video would probably take longer than decoding it. It has to be converted to a compatibly color format (uyvy would be the fastest, and that's what DVDivX and VC/DC both use) and then copied to the video hardware (this tends to be slow, even using store queues for the transfer like VC/DC does).

[Christuserloeser]

I dont think the dreamcast is powerful enough to process MPEG2 video used on dvds

Sofdec is around the same specs as MPEG2 used for DVDs and it's decoded via software, not hardware like on PS2.

http://web.archive.org/web/200111011...mlab_sfd_e.htm

[Elven6]

It's probably not powerful enough to decode and display DVD-resolution video fast enough to produce a watchable result. My guess would be that those audio formats might actually present less of a problem. I'm pretty sure that KOS currently supports more than one streaming stereo audio channel. Hacking something together to convert the rear-channel stuff to a 'Pro-Logic rear channel' wouldn't really take that much work, and the center channel could either be a mono streaming channel or mixed with the left and right channels. Downmixing would take some time obviously, but not nearly as much time as we'd be talking about to decode and display DVD-quality video. In fact, displaying the video would probably take longer than decoding it. It has to be converted to a compatibly color format (uyvy would be the fastest, and that's what DVDivX and VC/DC both use) and then copied to the video hardware (this tends to be slow, even using store queues for the transfer like VC/DC does).

Sega was making a DVD add on for the Dreamcast, so I don't think that is a problem, unless the drive itself had a processor in it.

[quzar]

Sofdec is around the same specs as MPEG2 used for DVDs and it's decoded via software, not hardware like on PS2.

http://web.archive.org/web/200111011...mlab_sfd_e.htm

No, it's not. Nowhere close. They're both MPEG2, and they probably both have similar maximum specs. That's like saying "well dreamcast can play divx, and I've seen HD divx stuff, so the DC can do HD".

The only way I see anyone ever getting DVD reading on the DC is via the IDE interface.

[Masta-G]

yeah, I think uDcDivx and VC/DC allready pushed video playback on the dreamcast to its maximum (bitrate-wise).
I was kinda hoping DcDivX got a bit optimized to support most ~90min 700MB divx movies with subtitles (.srt) support, so I could use my dreamcast console as a real DivX/Xvid player without having to downsample my movies.
Guess we have to do it with xbmc:P

[OneThirty8]

yeah, I think uDcDivx and VC/DC allready pushed video playback on the dreamcast to its maximum (bitrate-wise).

Nah. The last release of VC/DC was to replace the horrible audio output system that I used in the initial release. The Dreamcast is capable of better quality than that with MPEG-1/2. With VCD-quality MPEG-1, I think you should be able to expect about 2 or 3 dropped frames/second maximum. VC/DC 0.1a drops about 2/3 of all frames if it can, which is obviously far short of what I had hoped for. That was partly due to the less-than-optimal way the output systems work (no multi-threading at all) and partly due to my inferior framerate-checking code. Next release will be much better--but no promises on when that will be.

[Masta-G]

Nah. The last release of VC/DC was to replace the horrible audio output system that I used in the initial release. The Dreamcast is capable of better quality than that with MPEG-1/2. With VCD-quality MPEG-1, I think you should be able to expect about 2 or 3 dropped frames/second maximum. VC/DC 0.1a drops about 2/3 of all frames if it can, which is obviously far short of what I had hoped for. That was partly due to the less-than-optimal way the output systems work (no multi-threading at all) and partly due to my inferior framerate-checking code. Next release will be much better--but no promises on when that will be.

This makes me very happy to hear
Both my dreamcast consoles will be happy enough to try 'em once its released.
Keep up the good work:thumbup: