PSX STR/MOV video format documented

[m35]

I really want to thank the Q-gears development team for all their efforts, and especially for keeping the source code open. I also want to thank all those who have shared valuable information in these forums. This place is a gold mine.

I'm currently working on a project to decode the media from Playstation 1 games (http://code.google.com/p/jpsxdec/). Part of this project is to document what I have learned about PSX movie files (STR, MOV, XA, etc).

Quite a bit of effort has already been put into the document, but I still consider it to be a work-in-progress. I share it here so that it might be helpful to others, but I am also interested in feed-back (corrections, clarifications, etc.).

The current version can be found on my project download page:
http://code.google.com/p/jpsxdec/downloads/list

[G]

Good Work!
Your documentation is excellent, especially FF8 specifications, which I don't know yet.

[Sephiroth 1311]

Excellent.

[m35]

If anyone knows:

• anything about FF9 movie format
• anything about any other unique movie format (and I mean anything)
• names of games that can't be played via PSmplay/PsxMC/PsxTulz

I would be very interested.

I tried emailing segu about the FF9 format, but I doubt I'll get a response.

[darkvadd7]

Hi, very nice job for this.
I want to know if it is possible to encode an avi uncompressed file to mov, it is to translate the two videos with text.
Thanks.

[m35]

You are asking a difficult thing.

Currently the official Sony SDK STR encoder is the only working Playstation movie encoder.

I assume the only difference between .STR and .MOV is one has the extra 40 bytes of camera data that is unique to some FF7 movies (unconfirmed). So even if you did manage to properly re-encode the video, you would still have to manually edit the files to copy the camera data.

I hope to eventually add Playstation video encoding to jPSXdec, but with the current schedule that won't be for another year or so. Even if I started working on it right now it would still take me a few months.

If you have the drive to do it yourself, nearly all the information is available to you. The STR file format document explains all the details of Playstation video, and I have outlined how to write a Playstation video encoder here. Even if you don't have the drive to learn everything, you will still need some understanding of the PSX STR format to ensure your video data is properly formatted.

[darkvadd7]

OK, Thanks, but I can't do it myself. I hope you can do this one day 

[m35]

Note that I can be bribed with Japanese to English translators for this project.

Seriously, if even one translator appears, I will drop everything else I'm doing and immediately start on a jPSXdec encoder.

[darkvadd7]

Great, you have my support !