*new* Saroo video playback feature

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Ardiloso

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This is a bit wild. YZB is testing video playback streaming directly from Saroo. I'll try to explain with the limited information he provided.
The implementation is quite unique because it works like a slideshow with background music.
It consists of every video frame of the intended video (~5K images) at 320x240 displaying 30 images per second, along with a soundtrack file. The result is a virtually perfect video playback without artifacts (the few that do appear come from the source file, KoF98 DM) in fullscreen at 30 fps.

I uploaded it HERE. Bellow is an offscreen video I recorded, I'm using a RAD2x HDMI cable on a 65" TV (sorry about the air conditioning hum).
 
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There's nothing crazy or amazing about it. It's just uncompressed video being streamed through the cartridge port. It's completely useless and wasteful from an actual viability standpoint. This is about a 725MB file to provide 3 minutes of video. On top of that this is using 15bit RGB color, so there will be visible color banding artifacts. If I you want that to go away you'll need to use 24bit color which will double the size of the data.

In short, there's nothing special or useful about this. Even Segas tools supported doing this. No one did it because it's completely useless due to the amount of space it requires and the bitrate requirements far exceed even the DVD spec. Sure it looks nice because it's uncompressed, but it's completely unviable unless you really want to use a disc the size of a bluray for your FMV game or RPG with over an hour of 320x224 FMV.
 
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TrekkiesUnite118 said:
There's nothing crazy or amazing about it. It's just uncompressed video being streamed through the cartridge port. It's completely useless and wasteful from an actual viability standpoint. This is about a 725MB file to provide 3 minutes of video. On top of that this is using 15bit RGB color, so there will be visible color banding artifacts. If I you want that to go away you'll need to use 24bit color which will double the size of the data.

In short, there's nothing special or useful about this. Even Segas tools supported doing this. No one did it because it's completely useless due to the amount of space it requires and the bitrate requirements far exceed even the DVD spec. Sure it looks nice because it's uncompressed, but it's completely unviable unless you really want to use a disc the size of a bluray for your FMV game or RPG with over an hour of 320x224 FMV.
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It's an experiment, I don't think there are plans to use it "widespread". Like you said it isn't possible with stock hardware and they like to explore what would be possible with this cart. I really enjoy seeing things like this.
Anyway I don't know (and find it really strange) why you have a beef with Saroo, it is weird to hate on a hardware or inanimated objects at all, so you don't need to run to hate on everything related to it. People are allowed to like or discuss things you don't. Chill.
 
ROS said:
It's a neat experiment showing what the Saroo cartridge is capable of, running from SD in the year 2025, disc space is no longer a restriction.

Let them play.
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Disc space may not be an issue but uncompressed video still takes up an absurd amount of space. If someone tried to use this in say a homebrew port of FF7 you'd need about 14GB of space for just the video and audio alone. If you want 24bit color so you can match PS1 quality that's going to double to 28GB. If your SD card is 64 GB you'd end up using about half of it for a theoretical port using this. That's an absurd amount of space considering we can match PS1 quality with Cinepak and use up only 3 discs worth of space tops.

Ardiloso said:
It's an experiment, I don't think there are plans to use it "widespread". Like you said it isn't possible with stock hardware and they like to explore what would be possible with this cart. I really enjoy seeing things like this.
Anyway I don't know (and find it really strange) why you have a beef with Saroo, it is weird to hate on a hardware or inanimated objects at all, so you don't need to run to hate on everything related to it. People are allowed to like or discuss things you don't. Chill.
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I don't hate the Saroo. I'm simply pointing out that this is nothing new or impressive. It's just streaming uncompressed video. This is no more special than MSU1 video on the SNES or Mega Color in the Genesis. Both are neat from a curiosity standpoint but quickly become unviable for an actual FMV solution due to the space required.

It's pretty to look at sure, but let's not pretend it's something new or impressive.
 
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TrekkiesUnite118 said:
Disc space may not be an issue but uncompressed video still takes up an absurd amount of space.
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A Saroo enhanced small homebrew game project, with an intro, outro, and a few intermissions. Perfectly viable, not useless, but coming from the guy who refers to the use of the MPEG card as "cheating" I'd expect as much.
 
ROS said:
A Saroo enhanced small homebrew game project, with an intro, outro, and a few intermissions. Perfectly viable, not useless, but coming from the guy who refers to the use of the MPEG card as "cheating" I'd expect as much.
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Having a small hombrew game ballooned up to gigabytes for a few minutes of FMV isn't really viable, especially if you want your game to be playable by as many people as possible. Which if the only Saroo enhancement is that uncompressed FMV, I think most would agree that's a silly reason to limit your homebrew to only Saroo users.

As for the MPEG card I see you're still upset over that with the FMV competition. In that situation the MPEG card was cheating because we were comparing what the stock hardware was capable of decoding. With the MPEG card the Saturn isn't really doing anything while MPEG playback is happening. It's just receiving an external video and audio signal and outputing them. So for a competition to see what can be done on stock hardware doing that with what was a $200 luxury add-on is very much cheating. Hence why it was a separate category.
 
TrekkiesUnite118 said:
Having a small hombrew game ballooned up to gigabytes for a few minutes of FMV isn't really viable, especially if you want your game to be playable by as many people as possible. Which if the only Saroo enhancement is that uncompressed FMV, I think most would agree that's a silly reason to limit your homebrew to only Saroo users.

As for the MPEG card I see you're still upset over that with the FMV competition. In that situation the MPEG card was cheating because we were comparing what the stock hardware was capable of decoding. With the MPEG card the Saturn isn't really doing anything while MPEG playback is happening. It's just receiving an external video and audio signal and outputing them. So for a competition to see what can be done on stock hardware doing that with what was a $200 luxury add-on is very much cheating. Hence why it was a separate category.
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Oh, I personally am not upset, but I'm sure those other guys still are.

I see that you are promoting the use of ODE's for extended length playback with your own current Cinepak project.

I repeat, Let Them Play
 
ROS said:
Oh, I personally am not upset, but I'm sure those other guys still are.

I see that you are promoting the use of ODE's for extended length playback with your own current Cinepak project.

I repeat, Let Them Play
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I didn't say they can't tinker with it. I simply said it's silly and not really useful or impressive. What is it with people thinking that someone being bluntly realistic about something automatically means they hate it or are gatekeeping?

As for what I put in my Cineoak player, that will still work just fine on a real disc, going beyond a disc size simply let's you have more clips on the disc. On a disc you can still fit 45 minutes of FMV. The max the real CDROM block can access is about 1.35GB. After that it fails to read any data past that point. So if Saroos CDROM block emulation is accurate and has the same limitation, then this method is really useless as the most you could do is 3-5 minutes of FMV depending on your color depth and frame rate.

Video compression exists for a reason. I'd find it far more impressive if they were pulling off some newer kind of compression on a stock Saturn.
 
TrekkiesUnite118 said:
What is it with people thinking that someone being bluntly realistic about something automatically means they hate it or are gatekeeping?
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Maybe it's not I, as you have said, who is the one lacking communication skill. You've made your opinion clear, now let others enjoy the project, you never know where it may lead.
 
ROS said:
Maybe it's not I, as you have said, who is the one lacking communication skill.
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No, I think it's more that people are so emotionally invested in these kinds of devices that any realistic take is seen as a personal attack and they lash out.

ROS said:
You've made your opinion clear, now let others enjoy the project, you never know where it may lead.
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Again, not saying people can't enjoy it, just giving a realistic take on it. If people are upset over that thats their problem. This was posted originally last week and I've already seen people talking about using it in hacks and translations. So I think some realism on its viability is warranted.
 
TrekkiesUnite118 said:
No, I think it's more that people are so emotionally invested in these kinds of devices that any realistic take is seen as a personal attack and they lash out.



Again, not saying people can't enjoy it, just giving a realistic take on it. If people are upset over that thats their problem. This was posted originally last week and I've already seen people talking about using it in hacks and translations. So I think some realism on its viability is warranted.
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It's always someone else's problem, now isn't it Trek ?
 
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