Posted: 4/24/2004 10:36 PM
Post subject: Can't watch XviD (arkanoid, solstice v8)
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
If I try to watch arkanoid-timeattack-warpless-genisto.avi or solstice-timeattackv8-exim.avi, my system fails horribly. Winamp crashes with a segmentation fault, divxplayer is able to play the sound but the video locks up windows (win98) so badly that I have to reboot, VirtualDub can open the avis but can't process the images because of an unknown error (-100) and it guesses the avi is corrupt. There's a difference between these two avis and all the other timeattack avis: While all the other videos have been encoded with DivX (their FourCC code is "DIVX"), these two videos have been encoded (by someone else than Bisqwit) using XviD (their FourCC code is "XVID"). I tried to update my XviD codec to the latest version, for no avail. Unless someone can give me some ideas on how to get these videos working, it would be really nice if they were encoded in the same way as all the others. Granted, DivX is more or less proprietary and partly commercial (even though free third-party versions exist), but it has one advantage over XviD: It has a quite long history and is more supported, and in my personal experience is more stable (even though not perfectly). OTOH the XviD developers seem to have some odd principles: "No, we don't distribute binaries, only sources. If you want binaries, hope for someone to compile and test them for you, but don't expect us to help you if something goes wrong". "No, we don't know how to watch videos encoded with our codec, go somewhere else." They don't have official binaries, they don't have official support, they don't have anything. Seems like they simply don't care. A really odd principle. DivX might not be perfect, but at least they offer you something to use.
Posted: 4/24/2004 11:09 PM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
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I might be living in an illusion because libavcodec implements an incredibly wide support for different encodings, but to my knowledge xvid and divx have no significant differences that would make them incompatible. They are just different implementations of mpeg4 video. For details, see this page (MPEG4 codec feature comparisons): http://www.mplayerhq.hu/%7Emichael/codec-features.html I'm not using divx to encode the videos, but libavcodec, which is the library developed by the ffmpeg project. When I first heard of it, it was a cross-platform (portable) super fast mpeg4 encoder only. Anyway, I don't have an answer for your problem. Phil?
Posted: 4/24/2004 11:58 PM
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Arc
Editor, Experienced player (826)
Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 534
Location: Arizona
NES TAS of 2021
Why are these different than the others? Can anyone with Windows watch them without problems? (I cannot.)
Posted: 4/25/2004 12:12 AM
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Bisqwit
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They were encoded by Phil. I don't know details, except that he used XVID.
Posted: 4/25/2004 12:28 AM
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Arc
Editor, Experienced player (826)
Joined: 3/8/2004
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Location: Arizona
NES TAS of 2021
Yes, my question is why did he encode them instead of you.
Posted: 4/25/2004 12:31 AM
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Bisqwit
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Because he wanted to help and I am glad of that.
Posted: 4/25/2004 1:15 AM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I was able to view the videos by changing the FourCC codes from "XVID" to "DX50" with a hex editor (which makes the player to play the video using the DivX codec instead of the XviD one). Worked fine this way, but I wonder if I'm the only person downloading these videos who would need to use this kind of hacking to view them. The videos themselves seemed a bit odd. First I thought it could perhaps be a problem with my system (eg. trying to play a XviD-encoded video with the DivX decoder), but I consulted with Bisqwit and it seems that the problem is in the original video and not a problem with my codecs/players. The problem is that the video seems a bit jerky. This is almost not noticeable, you can barely see it, but it still is annoying. It looks as if the sampler used to capture the videos was dropping frames. As a rough estimate it looks to me a bit like the sampler was told to capture the video at 30fps but it could only get about 25 frames per second (meaning that each second lacks about 5 frames or so). This causes a slightly noticeable jerkiness (the sprites seem to very slightly jump forward a bit several times per second). This effect is certainly not present in any of the other videos (including the previous solstice videos).
Posted: 4/25/2004 12:02 PM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Bisqwit wrote:
I'm not using divx to encode the videos, but libavcodec
That may be so, but libavcodec is generating an AVI which claims to be a DivX-encoded one (meaning that when you play it in Windows the player will try to decode it using the DivX codec by default). Anyways, I would suggest that you sample those two videos yourself. I would like to see them with the same high quality as the other videos.
Posted: 4/25/2004 12:43 PM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (297)
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Location: Arzareth
I have many other submissions in queue at the moment, so I'll postpone that until there's nothing else to do. Meanwhile I suggest that Phil tries to improve his way of capturing the movie.
Posted: 4/25/2004 6:41 PM
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blip
Joined: 4/11/2004
Posts: 155
Location: Fairfax, VA, USA
Arc wrote:
Why are these different than the others? Can anyone with Windows watch them without problems? (I cannot.)
I use the VLC media player to play back XViD on Windows. I haven't yet found anything that VLC *can't* play back on Windows. Open Source, too.
Posted: 4/25/2004 6:59 PM
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Phil
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
Posts: 2623
Location: America, Québec
My ripped movies,Solstice and Arkanoid, need XviD 1.0.0 RC4 codec.With older version you see some glitches.You can found latest Windows Xvid codec at this site http://koepi.roeder.goe.net/xvid.shtml .
Posted: 4/26/2004 12:35 AM
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Phil
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
Posts: 2623
Location: America, Québec
Never thought Arkanoid and Solstice was so miserable the image quality is good but the frameskip is bad.It was caused by a supposed lostless codec when I record the video.Now I will only use Yuffiuv codec which create a 3Gb uncompressed video for each 7 minutes movies then encode it.
Posted: 4/26/2004 7:46 PM
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Phil
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Joined: 3/16/2004
Posts: 2623
Location: America, Québec
Solstice is now re-encoded is it ok?
Posted: 4/28/2004 11:30 AM
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Warp
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Phil wrote:
Solstice is now re-encoded is it ok?
Yes, it's much better now.
Posted: 4/29/2004 10:34 AM
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Nach
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
For Windows, get yourself the KL Codec pack. It has a ton of codecs, as well as movie software and other nonsense. http://www.filemirrors.com Search for Begins With klcodec Get the latest version, as of this writing, it's 225f.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Posted: 5/18/2004 3:14 AM
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Phil
Active player (411)
Joined: 3/16/2004
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Location: America, Québec
There's a new version of XviD.First you must uninstall you old version and install that new one.