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Mplayer Adds Sorenson v3 To the Linux Roster
prmths writes "mplayer now plays sorenson V3! This is the last major format that was unplayable under linux and it has now been conquered!
They also added the 2xsai algorithm for video scaling. This will let you increase the resolution of non-photo-like videos (anime/cartoons) by 2 times -- it's not a blurring algorithm -- 2xsai actually guesses edges and fills in the pixels."
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
... if somebody does a good port of it to win32.
Okay, its not clear from the site, what file formats remain unsupported/unplayable?
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Clearly not a codec implementation then, or not a full one. Besides, Sorenson will sue them into oblivion when/if they do get it working.
the different guessing/blurring algo's are quite well represented in many emu's.
some games look crap on some algos, while others look great.. depending on games style, and lots of other things, like what it looked on the arcade machine. those old monitors have a feel and look to the picture too..
btw, is sai2x basically 'eagle'?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The scaling is 2x in each dimension, so it makes it 4x bigger. Oh, and 2xsai works best on images with clearly defined edges, like arcade games and anime. PLain old movies wont get as much benefit, and some will get worsened artifacting.
Will this handle sound as well? With Sorenson 1 mplayer can do video but not sound, since only the video part was implimented. Does this include sound support?
(In any case - mplayer ROCKS!)
Crossover does a lot more than just play Quicktime stuff. Flash, Realplayer, Trillian and all sorts of other plugins are included too.
Also, by looking the algorithm on the page it seems to me that this algorithm decides which pixel value to use from left and right only. Running the result through a sligthly modified algorithm could perhaps provide 4x scaling with pretty nice image quality. Simple rotate the table with letters from A to I 90 degrees clock-wise and you should get an algorithm which selects best pixel value from above or below. It might be possible to join those algorithms for a single pass one but I'm afraid the result needs that many conditional jumps that it isn't usable for real time processing. Plus you usually don't need 4x scaling for video.
Scaling animated movie 4x with this algorithm and outputting it through hardware scaler to reduce pixel boundaries should provide pretty nice video quality...
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This means that those trailers can be played full-screen now. Never thought about that one. I always hated how you had to upgrade Quicktime to get that feature. Is it still the case? If so, not on Linux. ;)
It is informative b/c it provides a non-standard archive for a rapidly changing package, mplayer.
However, I prefer
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main
for mplayer et al (MANY MANY multimedia packages there).
You will learn, if you ever use Debian, that it rocks in a way other distros do not, and that you should start by wiping RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, or whatever off your boxen and keep it real. Install Debian across the net with a single floppy. Any aggros trolling of people using other distros is purely intentional.
What I mean is, the 2Xsai stuff (under whatever name) is great. I looked at two different pages of screenshots and was blown away- it was literally like redrafting the images to make them more appealing. That's very exciting.
Not only that- I've been flirting with the idea of doing some animations- not computer, but line art animations. I have only a simple 640x480 webcam for shooting the results, which would then be roughly NTSC resolution... LINE ART. See where I'm going with this? ANYTHING I could do with line art or even shading/crosshatching would be perfectly suited to being scaled with 2Xsai/Scale2X.
Which is GPLed under either name, so the exact name and source isn't that important. This one is OURS. And I find that incredibly exciting. I do the same thing- I've written digital audio wordlength reduction routines that are the best in the world by some yardsticks and among the best in the world by any standard, and I made them GPLed as well. The tools are falling into place- one person doesn't have to do it all by themselves, we can help each other, and it's getting to the point where in one area after another, the hottest tricks are covered under the GPL and available.
This is the way to do it. It's exciting to see it happening. And you bet I'm going to be coding up some sort of hack to try 2Xsai on scanned/cammed line-art. The coolest thing is that it will work just as well on any color depth, so long as you want to bring out cel-shadey effects and line edges. This is great, great stuff :)
High fives to ALL the people who've originated, inspired, and worked on this family of scaling algorithms- and BIG THANKS from someone who will be using it to do neat stuff that maybe you hadn't even anticipated. Because you might not have known there was somebody interested in drawing line art, shooting it with a limited-res camera and scaling it up while preserving the line-artiness of it. But you've just made it possible for anyone filming hand-drawn cels at 640x480 to upscale their footage to 1280x960... which, after just a bit of letterboxing, becomes HDTV standard 1280x720. Hell, digital cinema is only 1280x1024...
See why this is very exciting? You have a webcam-to-Feature-Film scaling algorithm there. In the event that you had such great cels that you really needed to get professional color density rather than crappy webcam color density, you can STILL do this through a simple webcam by taking multiple shots (say, 10 if you're anal) and AVERAGING them together. That completely deals with the color density problem- introduce slight lighting shifts if you want to get fancy with it. At that point it's only resolution- except, surprise! If you're working with line-art or cels, it's not! Bam, instant film/HDTV resolution output for ANYBODY.
Sorry for getting so relentlessly technical, but this is VERY exciting and has huge, huge implications AND it's all happening under the GPL. Excuse me for suggesting that we are kicking ass. Rock on :)