SSTV2 wrote on Yesterday, 01:36:

This is awesome! You should definitely open a new thread specifically just for this video converter/player so that it doesn't ge […]
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This is awesome! You should definitely open a new thread specifically just for this video converter/player so that it doesn't get lost in the pages of this thread.

I tested conversion of four videos in total and noticed that converter tends to mess up color palette. Out of four different videos, only one converted properly. One video turned out grayscale, other had light brown/red colors replaced with white and last video didn't even convert into a playable file, not sure why, but its palette file turned out entirely black.

Video that didn't convert is the same one that I attached in my last post of this thread, interestingly enough, neither original MP4 file, nor raw AVI, nor compressed AVI file converted.

A few observations:

-The image quality of the converted file is good, but the output file also takes up a lot of space. A 66s video at 320x200 res. takes up 20MB of hard disk space, at 160x120 res. it takes up 7MB (this is the video that turned out grayscale), for reference, the same video converted using Aviedit and MS Video 1 compressor at 75% quality - takes up only 3.2MB at 12FPS, though its quality is crap in comparison 😀

-Video player won't play a video if PC has no sound card installed. It would be nice to have an option that would omit sound track entirely and allow player to run this way.

-Converter allows custom resolution selection, but no option to change frame rate, thus some videos turn out way too jerky/uneven at 10FPS, it would be nice to have 12, 12.5 and 15FPS options, so that most commonly used video frame rates could be halved.

-It would be great to have more 4:3 aspect ratio resolution options among the existing ones, such as 224x168, 256x192 and 280x208.

-Videos does not play under DOSBox, which complicates testing.

Regarding the performance - I didn't notice any slowdowns running 160x120 videos on a 286-16 MHz machine, one of the tested video's playback at 320x200 res. turned out way too jerky by default, mainly because it was converted from 30 down to 10FPS, so I couldn't tell whether it lagged or not, but the benchmark results were as follows:

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1=== ANALISIS Y RECOMENDACION (basado en mediciones reales) ===
2Presupuesto por frame a 12.5fps: 80000 us
3  - Full-frame video (320x200=64000 bytes): 16386.1 us (20.5% del frame)
4  - Llenado de audio (882 bytes, rep movsb):  238.9 us (0.3% del frame)
5  - Margen reservado disco/overhead:        20000 us (25.0% del frame)
6  - TOTAL usado (peor caso, 320x200):        36625.0 us (45.8% del frame)
7
8Costo por bloque cambiado: 22.89 us/bloque
9
10>> En tu 286, el maximo cambio de bloques antes de que
11>> convenga mandar el frame completo es: 715 bloques

Not sure how to read them to be honest, does it mean that this machine covers only 20.5% of a full frame at 320x200?

Hi, thaanks for testing!! no, this bench means your computer need 20.5% of cpu to decode video and send to vgaa, 0.3% for pcm audio, for 10fps. Of course then you will have overhead of hdd/cd/etc then it will depend your media, 20+%

Your PC is pretty fast, you can decode 320x200 - 10fps at 40-50% of your cpu, less if your media is fast

About palette, is not my converter, is ffmpeg tht made the work, try for example this commands in ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i input.avi -vf scale=320:200:flags=lanczos,palettegen" -y palette.png ffmpeg -i palette.png -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 […]
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ffmpeg -i input.avi -vf scale=320:200:flags=lanczos,palettegen" -y palette.png
ffmpeg -i palette.png -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -y palette.raw
ffmpeg -i input.avi -f u8 -acodec pcm_u8 -ac 1 -ar 11000 -y audio.pcm

ffmpeg -i input.avi -i palette.png -filter_complex "[0:v]curves=all='0/0 0.0784/0 0.9216/1 1/1',fps=10,scale=320:200:flags=lanczos[v];[v][1:v]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=3" -pix_fmt pal8 -y frames\frame_%%05d.bmp

check the output, bmp, palette, etc

ffmpeg in my script, take care of everything exept compression. if you want my python script instead the exe, i can send in MP, but for now i dont waant to distribute

Anyways please share to me your videos info that fail

About size, a msvideo1 at 75% like you said is bad quality, very crapy, is not what i want in my videos. If you want to reduce size Threshold and Colorlimit is only way, Threshold check if one 8x8 block is XX% similar to the one in last frame to no update, less is more compression much blocky, and color limit tell the compressor how different colors can make a block change, for example, in one frme you have a black block, and next you haave same block but one pixel in middle in white. With a Threshold of less of 90% for sure this block will be eliminated and just not draw, but in a scene of alien in space this means maybe a lot of starts will dissapear! jeje in this case the Colorlimit will stop the compressor and check "hey the block is 95% similar, but white-black is very strong difference, not repeat". Colorlimit less number more strict

The good side of use less resolution is that you will have of course less 8x8 blocks to manage, the bad side is that compression is not linear, a 160x100 video, for example, will not be 1/4 of a 320x200 video, because the 320x200 video have MUCH chances of duplicated 8x8 blocks. Not always less is more

160x120 or similar, the goal is not much disk space, but CPU, aa 286-8mhz for sure will be more happy with this size of video than 320x200

Whe are in 2026, thank good, no more space limits, I have aa 256GB usb drive in my 286 for cdrom emulation,and two 16GB CF internal cards, but CPU and video card same in 90s, this is what i care

About fps, 10fps for me look perfect fluid in most situations, are you sure your ffmpeg is doing goood job selecting frames? did you check the bmps? anyways, if your ffmpeg is working fine, maybe you have videos with too much motion, in this case, yes, 15 or even 20fps will be better

The problem is that i work in integer in my code, not div or muls, 12-15 fps will not work, maybe 20fps yes, but uff 20fps in aa 286.. maybe i will try

I was thinking to write a timer pit divisor, nd check if i can addapt the pit to the fps, for sure i can do 18.2 fps, i will test

thanks

Just to clear things up, I used ffmpeg that was included with the converter for compatibility's sake. I tried to generate palette file and BMP frames using your batch commands for the video that doesn't convert and everything worked fine, just don't forget to add quotation mark after video filter alias in palette generation line. No need to send python script, I'm sure you'll figure out the problem in no time, there has to be an error somewhere in the script that messes up with ffmpeg.

These were the videos that I tested:
RML - this one doesn't convert and generate black palette;
MIB - palette looks almost grayscale + clusters of white pixels at the top of some frames;
RR - a lot of white patches;
Banana - perfect picture, but bad headbanging animation sync. due to 10FPS, requires at least 15.
-videos converted to mp4 format using any4k.com

I tried to increase video quality with Threshold set to 90, and Colorlimit to 500, no change in output video's palette (rest default).

theelf wrote on Yesterday, 14:43:

The problem is that i work in integer in my code, not div or muls, 12-15 fps will not work, maybe 20fps yes, but uff 20fps in aa 286.. maybe i will try

That's unfortunate, 15FPS video looks silky smooth compared to 10FPS 😀

SSTV2 wrote on Yesterday, 22:25:

Just to clear things up, I used ffmpeg that was included with the converter for compatibility's sake. I tried to generate palett […]
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Just to clear things up, I used ffmpeg that was included with the converter for compatibility's sake. I tried to generate palette file and BMP frames using your batch commands for the video that doesn't convert and everything worked fine, just don't forget to add quotation mark after video filter alias in palette generation line. No need to send python script, I'm sure you'll figure out the problem in no time, there has to be an error somewhere in the script that messes up with ffmpeg.

These were the videos that I tested:
RML - this one doesn't convert and generate black palette;
MIB - palette looks almost grayscale + clusters of white pixels at the top of some frames;
RR - a lot of white patches;
Banana - perfect picture, but bad headbanging animation sync. due to 10FPS, requires at least 15.
-videos converted to mp4 format using any4k.com

I tried to increase video quality with Threshold set to 90, and Colorlimit to 500, no change in output video's palette (rest default).

theelf wrote on Yesterday, 14:43:

The problem is that i work in integer in my code, not div or muls, 12-15 fps will not work, maybe 20fps yes, but uff 20fps in aa 286.. maybe i will try

That's unfortunate, 15FPS video looks silky smooth compared to 10FPS 😀

Hi!! thanks

This clips are TOO SMALL!!! jeje, i calculate palette every minute, you will need at least a 10 or more minute video to generate a nice palette!! i never believe someone will use for short clips!!

The problem is that generate a palette is a slow process, in a 1h movie at 24fps you have 86400 frames, because is too much, even for a modern i3 or i5, i just check for palette changes in ffmpeg evey 60seg 1 frame, 60 frames total from 86400. If you feed 1 minute video, you will never get anything. I will fix

Please check the video i made for you, sorry little delay audio, i realize after convert

That explains everything. I chose short clips for testing purposes as I simply can not afford to generate 20+ meg. videos for my 286 PCs as both of them use period correct hardware (no CF cards or FAT32 emulators) thus every file is transferred using Norton Commander's "Link" through SPP LPT port.

Thanks for the video, it runs perfectly on a 16MHz 286, but I noticed that the player maxes out the sound card's volume regardless of whether the audio mixer is loaded into memory or not and it stays at max even after exiting the player. One more thing, it would be nice to have an adjustable cropping parameter, as you can see from the example clip, it has black borders on the sides.

If your machine is networked, you could likely reuse my idea of using tvheadend (with a custom spawn profile) to do realtime transcoding, and to watch TV.

I use that idea to feed WMC with new DVB-T2 channels encoded in HEVC/H264, converting them in MPEG2 or H264 which is what WMC understand. But the transcode can be tailored for any need. SPAWN profiles just pass the job to an external program (usually ffmpeg, but that isn't sculpted in stone)

Obviously you need an external machine to act as a server , I use WSL or a Linux VM, but a Raspi or alike is more than enough

A few years ago, I managed to play the "Bad Apple" AVI video on a 386SX-16 MHz system in windowed mode, using settings of 160x120 at 30 FPS and 320x240 at 15 FPS, with 8-bit PCM 22050 Hz mono audio.

https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=p2C8m1dr4Zdm_3vU&t=3105

https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=a7TzZkWK_fnZCIDr&t=3378

With worse performance in full‑screen mode.
https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=jDU9y1ggbjmYQRux&t=4244

A comparison of the performance of Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.
https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=9u_B-ibq8BPkzu8C&t=4074

Will a 286 running at 16 MHz with zero wait states handle that kind of AVI video better?

ok guys 16fps video and 16khz audio option

I made a example using the bad apple video Takedasun say, please test, if work fine, i will upload the converter, i want to share only if is working fine, not to upload bad stuff jeje

https://limewire.com/d/25fjb#lPwEISajZ9

SSTV2 wrote on Today, 14:33:

That explains everything. I chose short clips for testing purposes as I simply can not afford to generate 20+ meg. videos for my 286 PCs as both of them use period correct hardware (no CF cards or FAT32 emulators) thus every file is transferred using Norton Commander's "Link" through SPP LPT port.

Thanks for the video, it runs perfectly on a 16MHz 286, but I noticed that the player maxes out the sound card's volume regardless of whether the audio mixer is loaded into memory or not and it stays at max even after exiting the player. One more thing, it would be nice to have an adjustable cropping parameter, as you can see from the example clip, it has black borders on the sides.

Hi, i have a AWE64 Gold, then because no noise, i have mixer at 100%, did not realize the bug, i think is corrected now

About the crop, yes is there 320x184, you need to select widescreen and just cropt whetever you want, i add 320x200 cropped too and custom cropped

For me, i already suffered too many years of crappy HDD and slow floppy, no need anymore of this, thanks. I dont reemember very well, in your case is not best to use Interlnk ? i used back on time

I add two thing you ask, crop options and 16fps with high biterate too, because i dont use any buffer, fps and audio rate are attached, next version thanks

Takedasun wrote on Today, 17:13:

A few years ago, I managed to play the "Bad Apple" AVI video on a 386SX-16 MHz system in windowed mode, using settings of 160x12 […]
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A few years ago, I managed to play the "Bad Apple" AVI video on a 386SX-16 MHz system in windowed mode, using settings of 160x120 at 30 FPS and 320x240 at 15 FPS, with 8-bit PCM 22050 Hz mono audio.

https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=p2C8m1dr4Zdm_3vU&t=3105

https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=a7TzZkWK_fnZCIDr&t=3378

With worse performance in full‑screen mode.
https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=jDU9y1ggbjmYQRux&t=4244

A comparison of the performance of Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.
https://youtu.be/8ltPiPhj1CM?si=9u_B-ibq8BPkzu8C&t=4074

Will a 286 running at 16 MHz with zero wait states handle that kind of AVI video better?

is not about raw power, the 286 is faster than the 386SX for integer, but for uneven framerates and sound bitrate, a 386 because 32bits div and muls and etc is MUCH faster than a 286 if not optimized for 16bit integer operations

A 286 can do faster 1000/10 = 100 milisecons for decode 10fps. and 10000khz sound / 10 = 1000 packet of PCM every frame, than uneven like 1000/12fps for example,and need to use floats

I use your bad apple example to do a 16fps 320x200 video and a new player, with 16khz audio PCM. In my 286 25mhz i did some benchmark and is using like 30-40% of cpu, i think is possible to maybe even do 640x400, but is out of my interest