Hi everyone, I’m new to these forums. I’m curious as to whether anyone has done work with any type of video on the vb. Is it even possible? I know cart size could be a bit limited… but even a few seconds? Has anyone worked on any type of codec? Any info would be greatly appreciated.

The VB has a full FPU and Bitstring opcodes (and/or/xor one array of data onto another), so it should be more than capable of running one of the simpler codecs. The bigest hurdle is the low amount of memory, but you can overcome that by placing your lookup tables in the rom instead of in the memory space.
Any codec that works on the Playstation could probably be ported fairly quickly, and of cource any codec that works on the GBA, etc would be trivial to port. But the GBA does not have a FPU so these codecs would not be fully optimized for the VB.

David

I think it would be better to write a VB-specific codec and re-encode any video you want to display.

This would prevent the VB from having to decode things it can’t use (like color) and then throw them away.

It would also allow tricks like changing the BRT registers within a frame to simulate more shades.

Also, if converting stereo video (which is the point of using a VB in the first place, right?) you could use the similarities between the two images to almost halve the data size.

The only problem being finding out how to write a codec for your OS of choice… Anyone have any expertise in this area?

There are several open source codecs that can be munged down to handle low color data. For the VB it would be simplest to go with a motion jpeg style encoding scheem, except that jpeg does not work well with only 4 colors. But a tight png compression scheem on each frame and having the ability to refference the same frame multiple times would reduce the video data by at least a 4x amount.

For stereo effects you can play tricks, for example if you pan to the left on a sceen, you can take an image that you showed on the left screen 2 seconds ago and display it later on the right screen, presto instant 3D. I saw a 3D moving hologram of elvis that someone made from a video clip. The video camera had done a 360 deg sweep of elvis during a show. So to generate 3D they just staggard the frames, frame one went to the left screen, and frame 5 went to the right. Next frame 2 goes to the left, and 6 to the right… on and on… Anyway it was very convincing, and easy to do. So make lots of horizontal pans in your video shots and you will be able to virtualy eliminate the overhead of 3D.

David Tucker

this sounds like a new step in VB Developing 😉
btw, david you got the mail i wrote you?

With the flicker 3D images? Yea that was cool Im definently thinking of implementing that in the next round of reality boy! I have not had time to look at the rest, but i hope to get to it this week.

David

Cool,
this flicker methode is good for people who can not see 3D because of Eye Problems.
The rest per email 😉

CODES FOR ALL VB VIDEO