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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."
"I'm 2xSaI for my shorts"?
Doh!
at least the code is working, and was uploaded to CVS, but it needs some hacking to get it work... (not so bad, you need some DLLs from QT5 player and sdk, and libwine from wine-20020310 and some config.h editing) - okay, we'll work on getting this more user-friendly...
At least it DOES work
But mommy, why do they hurt Tux like that?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Advancemame, linked from this story for the Scale2x description, is a fine piece of software, and currently employed in my MAME cabinet. It's ironic, though: for my money, the scale effect really ruins the look of many arcade games, and particularly of things like pacman. While so many gamers are obsessed with getting the most out of their video cards, those interested in emulation often want the very opposite...
It's still cool voodoo, of course.
2xsai actually guesses edges and fills in the pixels
:)
and an MP3 player that doubles the number of notes in a song by guessing and filling them in!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No, it means those .movs encoded with Sorenson v3. Including all newer trailers on Apple.com.
This rocks! Now I can play those Harry Potter 2 trailers for my girlfriend. The interesting thing is that I just downloaded Pre-10 last night, hoping that this codec was complete. Unfortunately, it wasn't. But the guys at MPlayer cracked the code. You rock! Thanks for making the best video player for UNIX/Linux. No thanks to Apple for being a royal pain in the butt when it comes to their video format.
Speaking of MPlayer, has anyone tried this? It is a plugin for Mozilla that uses XV overlays and MPlayer to show movies in Mozilla. I'd imagine that it works with plugin compatible apps like Opera also. I haven't tried it yet. Can anyone offer their opinions? I am looking forward to a time when I can finally play those annoying streaming WMV videos in my browser, without having to fight with some ASX file that redirects.
That reminds me of this Flipcode IOTD. It's pretty impressive if you're upsampling something cartoon-ish with not much high frequency detail.
Um, no.
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 *real* homepage of the 2xSaI algorithm is:
Kreed's Homepage: 2xSaI : The advanced 2x Scale and Interpolation engine
It is totally different for Scale2x, which is the link that was given. 2xSaI was orignally developed by Kreed (a.k.a. Derek Liauw) for the SNES9x Super Nintendo emulator. Oh, and technically, it IS a blurring algorithm, just a smart one.
You can find lots of info here and here.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
exactly how hacked up is this?
j afW5d56.6@.3bbaee75
Does anyone know? Does anyone know if the mplayer people (or whoever is actually responsible) cooperated with sorenson?
Heres a discussion i had at the apple boards on exactly this matter:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?50@198.U0G
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Help my mini cause: My journal
Actually apple doesn't own the Sorenson(spelling) codec. That's from the company named the exact same as the codec. Apple owns quicktime which is just a container.
"Full sources for linux currently runs to about 200kB compressed" --Linus Torvalds 31-Jan-1992
As far as I can tell, this was the last major codec that didn't work. Well, it kinda worked before, but sound was unplayable. As of yet though, I've not come across any other file that didn't play.
Here is a codec status page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/codecs-status.html. It is updated frequently.
If you get MPlayer, the codec pack, and configure it for XV video output and SDL audio output on a properly accellerated system, the playback produces virtually no CPU load. It is an incredible program. I really like the fact that the GUI is completely optional, and you can just use keypresses to manipulate movie playback.
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.
But a player would be nice. Even Real Networks has a community supported player for UNIX/Linux.
This rocks! Now I can play those Harry Potter 2 trailers for my girlfriend.
:)
For your girlfriend...riiiiggghhhtt
Oops... We did it again :) So you can play your favourite brand-new quicktime movie trailers with mplayer! Oops... you cannot yet... at least the code is working, and was uploaded to CVS, but it needs some hacking to get it work... (not so bad, you need some DLLs from QT5 player and sdk, and libwine from wine-20020310 and some config.h editing) - okay, we'll work on getting this more user-friendly... :) so be patient, it'll be available in next (pre)release for sure!
Wouldn't it be simpler to just run QT5 under WINE? This doesn't really look like support, from my point of view.
Soon, I will be able to play the trailers for Matrix Reloading without having to switch over to my Windows box.
_
Cool.
Soon, I will be able to laugh at all the Apple Switcher campaign videos with ex-drug addict teenagers.
Cool.
Still, what does this mean for the folks who made the Crossover plugin program?
I can't imagine it will muck them up too bad since they have a half dozen distros ready to put Crossover Office on their disks.
_______________________________________________
ACK
..and is horribly slow under WINE. Not to mention mplayer works in console as well as X, and anything that works with mplayer also works in mencoder.. so guess what, Sorenson -> DivX is now very simple and straightforward.
Not really (at least IMHO) they figured out how to make use of the original DLLs. You will still need the DLL's from a QuickTime 5 installation (as well as wine acc. to the description). This is not reverse engineering the codec, just figuring out how spit encoded frames to the dll and understand the decoded frames it spits back. What was done with the previous sorenson codecs (of actually figuring out how to decode) was much more impressive (at least to me).
They already use the "use dlls" methods for real codecs, except in that case they have the real linux .so's to use.
I didn't know that it existed. Here's a link that I found
http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger.html
Says that it works with Opera, so it has my attention. Does it work with streaming of WMV files?
Crossover does a lot more than just play Quicktime stuff. Flash, Realplayer, Trillian and all sorts of other plugins are included too.
Does it strike anybody else as rather funny that so much effort has been put into the ability to watch adverts? I mean outside of Apples own adverts and the trailors it buys up, what is Sorensen used for these days (on platforms other than the mac).
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...
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
echo "http://mplayer.nmeos.net/ unstable main" >>
apt-get install mplayer-686
apt-get install mencoder-686
Yes it *does*, but only under cygwin, and you need an Xserver to run it. BEcause of this it is very sslloooooowwwww
I don't think they "cracked the code" so to speak. It sounds like they hooked into the DLLs the right way and got it to work in Linux with the help of WINE. It's still a "black box," which is a good thing since there's no worries about reverse engineering the codec (just the DLLs).
is sai2x basically 'eagle'?
Eagle and Kreed's 2xSaI are based on different algorithms. The "Super Eagle" and "Super 2xSaI" filters by Kreed are combinations of the techniques of Eagle and 2xSaI.
Will I retire or break 10K?
- RealAudio ATRC (sony atrac3) audio support (using binary plugin)
It should be possible to play ATRAC content with mplayer, at least on x86 platforms.Apple does. Its Quicktime Pro with the additional MPEG-2 decoder. I don't know the exact cost for it but I think its around $45.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
and an MP3 player that doubles the number of notes in a song by guessing and filling them in!
Actually, that's exactly how "mp3PRO" technology works. It stores a low-bit-rate MP3 of signals from 20 Hz to 8000 Hz, and then it does "spectral band replication" to guess at the frequencies from there to 16000 Hz.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Notice, though, that the screen shot from Metal slug looks pretty dope.
Pac-Man was designed to look exactly as you see it on the screen, pixel for pixel -- so I'm sure the interpolation looks (or, perhaps more accurately, feels) like it's drifted a bit from what the artist(s) intended.
The graphics of Metal Slug and just about every other modern game, on the other hand, are downsampled to a given screen resolution. In those situations, the algorithm would offset the downsampling and possibly render an image that's closer, not further, from what the artists intended.
Im still trying to work out how you actualy enable it at the moment though.
Are you sure that WINE isn't only needed to install Quicktime to leech the codecs? There hasn't been a single codec that has required WINE for anything that has played through MPlayer.
I know that they've been halfway there to achieving Sorenson playback for a while. Video has worked very nicely. It is the audio that didn't play back. Doing this in a bass-ackwards sort of way with WINE wouldn't really seem like something that they would do.
This will never be an acceptable solution until
distributions can support it out of the box.
That will require actually figuring out the
file format instead of just hacking in some
DLL's.
You are probably violating Apple's license by
doing this anyway.
Here is where his packages are now.
http://marillat.free.fr/
This is the last major format that was unplayable under linux and it has now been conquered!
Codeweavers have been willing to sell you a product that allows Quicktime playback for ages. The only real advantages the new mplayer code offers are it being integrated into a more generic media player, and it being free as in beer. You're still stuffed on non-x86 platforms.
Well. If you don't defend your copyright. You loose it. If someone gets to reverse engineer your code and you let them. Everyone can.
I never thought I'd be the one to complain about "crack-smoking moderators" but the above statement is completely untrue.
It is true that you have to vigorously defend your trademark lest it fall into common usage (see "Q-Tip" vs. "cotton swab", "Xerox" vs. "photocopy", et al.) but the same does not apply to copyrights. (To be fair,
And reverse-engineering has nothing to do with copyrights, that's a patent issue. Barring any patent infringements, I am perfectly within my rights to create source code that produces an identical effect or product as yours, so long as I don't actually use any of your code in my proejct.
You can attempt to distribute copyright source code under a license that says "you shalll not attempt to reverse-engineer this software" but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax...
Jay (=
Will this bug be fixed in a later release?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
It requires Wine. Blech! And to think I thought they had actually cracked the codec.
Plugger is a piece of crap.
It has no intuition what-so-ever, and almost every time mozilla crashes for me im pretty sure its because of plugger: It doesnt crash when plugger isnt loaded, and when it does crash there are normaly 10 instances of plugger running. I wish someone would rewrite it. Hell I'd rewrite it myself if I had any idea how to.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
There is also a GUI for mencoder. It requires QT3 (a KDE app).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmencoder/
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. ;)
Reading the documentation makes it seem a lot tougher than it actually is. It would seem that all of the information there is to actually help you set up specific videocards for overlays and accelleration. Most binary driver installers seem to do this automatically for you though nowadays, so it isn't really an issue.
It did take me some tweaking to figure out what worked best. It seems that in most cases though, XV (video) and SDL (sound) are the best choices. Make sure thatyou are using XFree 4.2 and have the best drivers for your card. nVidia, PowerVR, ATi (with GATOS drivers), most S3 cards, Neomagic (with a modified driver), and Trident cards work. OpenGL output can work with just about any OpenGL card, but it is slower. There is also a framebuffer driver for Matrox cards.
Don't you mean
/etc/apt/sources.list
/etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb http://mplayer.nmeos.net/ unstable main" >>
but since that doesn't seem to work anymore, try
echo "deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main" >>
F.O.Dobbs
I've seen some really astonishingly cool 3-d VR type stuff done in quicktime, of all things. Some car sight (Honda? Ford?) has one, where you can take a virtual tour of the inside of the cars - it's really amazing.
Why bother with mplayer on windows?
Media Player Classic combined with FFDShow is all you need to playback any kind of MPEG1/2/4 content, and realmedia (provided realplayer 8 or 9 is installed). MPC looks just like Media player 6.4 and has useful features such as keyboard control, built-in subtitle rendering, and various video control options.
This wasn't a troll in the slightest, especially considering the legal battles between Apple and Sorenson about who owns the codec. I mean, if you can recompile mplayer to use the Sorenson codec for free under Darwin...
/. dunce cap.
if I were a lawyer for Sorenson, this would be a nontrivial development, that's all.
But then again, I'm NAL, so maybe I should just sit in the corner with my
Of couse we like rev,. engineered codecs more...
BUT:
- it's way too much work
- legal problems (it's illegal to crack the dll, but it isn't illegal to use them as-is)
- you have to rev.eng. every single codecs, and there are so many... so it's even more work.
+ rev.eng'd codecs can eb optimized to hell (so can be faster than DLL)
+ rev.eng'd codecs run on non-x86 platforms too
so, if you did it for any codecs, feel free to send me or to the ffmpeg team the source and we'll include it in the next mplayer release.
sorry, we have no time to crack the 600kB DLL containing the svq3 decoder, and the 4MB DLL containing qdmc/qdm2 audio and all the others...
(anyway it will be done sooner or later, as happened to cinepak, svq1, divx3/msmpeg4/wmv1, wma and to all the others)
A'rpi
How many libraries, sublibraries, and DLL's does this require now? Even if you could encode just as easily as you can decode every new codec, just by tracking down a dozen libraries and DLL's, your movie would be unplayable no sooner than it became playable because the binary format changed. As for pure decoding of internet downloads, who is still getting high on thumbnail videos today?
It's $20.
Hey, that looks far better than the dodgy anti-alising that I get under X, I want Scale2x fonts not AA fonts.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Guessing edges and smoothing them out -- impressive. That's basically what a human artist does when (s)he takes a miniature picture and uses it to make a painting.
When we draw a larger version of something, we don't have pixelated or blurred edges. Its great that algorithms can finally realize what an edge is and not blur it.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
No..
AA is for making a smooth bitmap from an outline.
2xSai is more like making an outline from a bitmap.
Original:
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Scaled:
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2xSai:
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My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Damn that is some great news!!
:(
Now MPlayer is missing only ONE major feature, and that is playing from those fscking rtsp://*.real.com urls... rtp/rtsp already works great for some sites, but *.real.com-servers don't follow the rtsp-protocol and uses some secret authentication-method to check that it is an official RealPlayer that is connecting... Really annoying! This will have to be fixed! 95% of the stuff people "need" to download via rtsp are on real.com-servers..
Anyway, great work!!!!!!!!!!!!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Well, its a start, recognizing he edges in simple images.
Yes, this only works well for relatively simple images -- you won't be able to zoom in on complex images with edge-retention.
But at least its a start. The way to go about these things is to try to figure out how people can look at a wallet-sized picture and turn it into a poster without introducing blurs or pixelation. Yes, our eyes can see at a very high level of resolution, but we're not capable of consciously discerning the entirity of that resolution in a conscious manner.
We are, in short, capable of recognizing (in a portrait) where the person's head ends, what lines define their eyes, nose, ears, hair, etc. We're also able to recognize what gradiated things (such as the increasing darkness as you approach the side of the face) should remain smooth and continuous. The idea is to allow computers to also recognize that, thus expand a wallet-sized picture into something the size of the entire screen.
Obviously, you can't add detail where it wasn't present before. If the picture is too small to make out the freckles on the girl's face, they won't show up in the magnification. But you can at least have a realistic blow-up function.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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.
It's not Apple's fault. Apple has been very open with their QuickTime format, to the extent that it's one of the best supported AV transports in Linux. The big hint about who's to blame for problems playing any QuickTime movie encoded with the Sorenson codec is hidden somewhere in the name of the codec.
mplayer starts CLI, gmplayer starts gui. It's been that way for a while.
kc8apf
Yeah, yeah, OT distro war, but I find debian's packages to be a bit out of date (even in unstable, which tends to live up to its name.) Not to mention that if you install anything via means besides apt, it screws things up. Not that Mandrake is any better, but IMO mandrake is a lot more user friendly than debian, plus it keeps packages on the bleeding edge. And you can install with XFS! :)
the link to 2xsai is here at http://elektron.its.tudelft.nl/~dalikifa/. the link provided in the article is to Scale2x. The page even says at the top "Instead, this effect is pretty different from the SuperEagle, 2xSaI, Super2xSaI effects "
This sig intentionally left blank.
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 :)
I have an i810 machine at work. I have gotten mplayer to work fullscreen with it. Some of Branden's 4.2 packages have just hit testing and those work. The i810 X driver is a little flakey and you may have to reboot to get the video chipset into a sane enough state for Xv to work.
The OS is stable and otherwise usable; it's just that the video can go partially into lala land (DRI and Xv give up, X sometimes crashes when switching to and from virtual consoles..will restart minus DRI and Xv working). You may also have to get Intel's latest firmware for the i810.
Also, my machine is using 16bit color depth...may make a difference. You'll have to disable a bitmap caching option to avoid some gui corruption issues at 16 bit depth. Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" in the i810 Device section takes care of it. It doesn't hit performance too badly.
Also, DRI got much faster with the i810 xserver in testing's 4.2 debs. GLTron is playable with all of the texture eyecandy turned on.
This is the last major format that was unplayable under linux and it has now been conquered!
Windows Media 9 format (aka WMV3) doesn't work.
Actually, it doesn't work in any other player either - even earlier versions of Windows Media Player can't make sense of it, even if the codecs have been installed on a Windows system (unlike any other WMV or AVI codec).
Say hello to DRM "security"..
I wonder what impact this is going to have on future donations of code. If these guys had a couple of months to make all their money before someone makes a free piece of software using their code that pretty much renders their software pointless, I wonder whether in the future people will be willing to donate code. :-(
May we never see th
Their fileformat (.ra/.rm) is already reverse enginered and has a GPL implementation in ffmpeg/libavcodec. Their codecs are not reverse engineered yet though, but MPlayer can still play them through the RealPlayer/RealOne DLLs.
But they added a secret handshaking to the open rtsp-protocol to prevent people from saving rtsp://-streams to disk. The reason this should be reverse engineered is not because I have anything against Real and want to "backstab" them, it so people with 56k-modems can watch those 300Mbit streams by saving them to disk first.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Any use of the codec outside Apple products would require the agreement of both Apple and Sorenson. This seems unlikely to happen.
I'm getting the DRI driver is out of date when I try to use it. Yes, I also use the XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps and that fixes the GTK theme corruption.
It's getting there, but I still hate the i810 chipset. Give me an NVidia or Radeon any day.