What are YOU watching on YouTube.com?

[offsidewing]

Hey, aren't those Diamond guys from John Madden Duo Football??

[offsidewing]

Oh, since this is a 'what are you watching' thing, I'll take a second to plug my sibling's latest project.

http://www.drawnbypain.com/

It's not for everyone and the subject matter is a little dark.  But heck, a turbo enthusiast is a major contributor to the show!

I've got six episodes left (they've already filmed 6 and it's in post) to get the Turbo into a shot.

[_joshuaTurbo]

http://www.drawnbypain.com/

That is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen in quite some time!

Awesome!  ~ who's the incredible woman?     

DAAAAAMN!       

[Bonknuts]

The contrast was turned up a bit too high and the audio input as well (little distorted) on the capture card.

 Enjoy.

[Keranu]

The contrast was turned up a bit too high and the audio input as well (little distorted) on the capture card.

 Enjoy.

Very interesting, I enjoyed seeing that!

[Joe Redifer]

That was cool.  Why didn't Sherlock Holmes look that good?  It was always pausing every 6 or so frames whereas this seems to run without problem.  Are you insinuating that YOU are better than the mighty and invincible ICOM SIMULATIONS?

Also, this has nothing to do with Huvideo, but I wish Japan would put a bit more effort into the "animation" part of their anime.  Moves are looped over and over and few frames are used.  The dude playing the drums doesn't even sync with the actual drum beats heard in the music, nor does the singer sync with the vocals.

EDIT:  The entire audio seems out of sync by at least a second for the whole clip.  Sherlock Holmes already did that.

[esteban]

That was cool.  Why didn't Sherlock Holmes look that good?  It was always pausing every 6 or so frames whereas this seems to run without problem.  Are you insinuating that YOU are better than the mighty and invincible ICOM SIMULATIONS?

I actually bought the DVD versions of Sherlock Holmes and some Vampire FMV games... I was worried that the company, Infinite Ventures, was on the verge of disappearing (i.e. bankruptcy), so I snatched those babies up. Surprisingly, no one was selling them on ebay, yahoo, amazon, etc. at the time.

The video quality of the FMV is impeccable, my dear Joe . So I made "ICOM SIMULATIONS" stickers and slapped them on the DVD's.

Well, I thought about it.

[Bonknuts]

That was cool.  Why didn't Sherlock Holmes look that good?  It was always pausing every 6 or so frames whereas this seems to run without problem.  Are you insinuating that YOU are better than the mighty and invincible ICOM SIMULATIONS?

Also, this has nothing to do with Huvideo, but I wish Japan would put a bit more effort into the "animation" part of their anime.  Moves are looped over and over and few frames are used.  The dude playing the drums doesn't even sync with the actual drum beats heard in the music, nor does the singer sync with the vocals.

EDIT:  The entire audio seems out of sync by at least a second for the whole clip.  Sherlock Holmes already did that.

 Yeah, the audio is progressively out of sync. That's from virtualdub(max) incorrectly reading the frame rate from the mpeg file. Oh well - it's just a test. Btw - Gulliverboy and Yuna huvideo disc use 10fps uncompressed video playback. When I finish some of my other gfx tools, I'll do a test with more colors per frame.

[Keranu]

Also, this has nothing to do with Huvideo, but I wish Japan would put a bit more effort into the "animation" part of their anime.  Moves are looped over and over and few frames are used.  The dude playing the drums doesn't even sync with the actual drum beats heard in the music, nor does the singer sync with the vocals.

Totally agreed! Us Americans take our time with the animation to make movement very fluid instead of focusing our time on making one detailed drawing.

[termis]

HuVideo is neat, but just it's just that - interesting for a short time.  It's still super small, grainy, and choppy.  In a way, I'm glad that the PC-Engine CD-ROM wasn't capable of really high-quality FMV.  Kept the developers honest in making good playing games as opposed to what happened to something like the Sega CD.

[Joe Redifer]

Can Tomcat Alley be done on the PCE?  By that I mean Full-screen video?  I think both the Sega CD and PCE-CD run at 1x.  So the data rate is there.

[termis]

I'd assume that the PC Engine didn't have the processing power like that of the Genny+Sega CD combo to decode _full_ screen video smoothly.  Heck, it was choppy as is with that tiny window.

Even the Sega CD was only barely able to something like that using Cinepak towards the latter part of its life, right?

[Bonknuts]

Hmm.. uncompressed video at 240x224 (near fullscreen) would be doable at 5fps. The SegaCD FMV afte SonicCD (and one other) started using Cinepak video compression scheme designed for simpler/slower CPUs. I know the SegaCD Cinepak allows for variable frame rate per frame (defined in milliseconds) and keyframes with difference frames.

 Even though PCE cpu is pretty quick with memory read/write access, the SegaCD had the second CPU transfering the data from the cdrom while the first cpu was free to handle decompression. On the PCE CD system, the systems CPU has to transfer the data from the CD buffer itself - so I'm not sure how much cpu resource is free handling more complex cinepak decompression.

 Anyway, I was going to say that even though the FMV might be grainy because to the tile *and* palette limitations - animation using variable frame rate + buffer system, would have been really useful for cinemas - Full screen "with lots of animation" cinemas. Something along the lines of SegaCD Popful Mail.

[Joe Redifer]

I'm pretty sure the Sega CD CPU handled the decompression and just sent finished tiles to the Genesis, and the Genesis CPU just placed the tiles where it's told to (just like it handles scaling/rotation).  I don't know why a CPU would be needed just to read info from the CD.  The CPU needs to actually do something if it is being used.

Anyway the animation in Sega CD Popful Mail is quite awesome.  I don't see why the PCE couldn't do something like that.  Do any games have animation of that quality?

[Bonknuts]

Anyway the animation in Sega CD Popful Mail is quite awesome.  I don't see why the PCE couldn't do something like that.  Do any games have animation of that quality?

Sadly, no. I really surprised they didn't - I mean full screen streaming animation is much cleaner than FMV at the time.

 Anyway, the SegaCD CPU has to tranfer data from the CD cache as the main CPU can not and the cd cache is not part of the 1M/1M memory layout of the SUB-CPU. Though- you're right that you could write code for the SUB-CPU to hand decompression, but then timing gets more complicated since it has to hand precise window timing to read from the CD cache stream(requesting a CD seek and read from the cd unit while reading from the cache). Fonzie on the sega-dev forums ran into this problem.

 Here's the segacd dev doc if you're interested. It also mentions some of the limitations I was talking about earlier with the SegaCD GFX effects and FMV.