PSX Movie Reencoding / Movie Crash Fix

[cromas]

I wasn't sure whether it was more appropriate to resurrect one of the several topics about this, or start my own post...so I'll go with the latter.

I played through everything on my game fine until the top of Gaea's Cliff, at which point a corrupted greatpit.avi caused it to hang. Codec switches, as suggested on thread 4876, didn't work. I opened the offender with VirtualDub, re-encoded it to Indeo 5.1, and it worked fine...until I got through the Whirlwind Maze, at which point biglight.avi also caused a hang. My re-encoding of greatpit.avi looked really ugly, so instead of reencoding biglight as well, I decided to go fetch my PSX discs and have at it.

I used PSXVideo to extract the original (much higher-quality) videos from the PSX discs, then encoded them with highest-quality Indeo 5.10 for the video and 128kbps MP3 for the audio. They are much better looking than the original FF7PC versions and smaller file sizes to boot.

I believe both Indeo 5.1 and MP3 are pre-installed standard in Windows XP, so if anyone else needs these fixed videos, let me know, and I will get them to you.

On that note, I thought I might go ahead and encode all of the original PSX videos for use on FF7PC, which would decrease the size of the game installation, solve crashing problems, and look way better. I searched around the forum and saw several people suggest this conversion for various reasons, but am unaware of anyone who has actually done so. Opinions? Would anyone else be interested in having these re-encodes? Would there be any legality to deal with if I were to release a package of all of them?

[Covarr]

DON'T release a package. The legality of that is, in fact, an issue.
DO release either detailed instructions or some sort of a patch program that will automatically do it for anybody with the PSX game.
OR do nothing, because it's your time.

[cromas]

Unfortunately it would be impossible to do any sort of patch program for this, since the files have no binary relation, despite being the same actual movie. Similarly, the process itself will take many hours and several tools, so while I will probably write up a guide, it's far more amicable to be able to release something. Sigh.

[EmperorSteele]

..yeah, i tried someting similair to this, but i noticed a slowdown in the movies, and mis-synching of video/audio.  And when i reverted back to the old movies, the problem persisted, and it's been that way ever since, even through multiple windows installations and new hardware, hahaha

or maybe i always had that and never noticed...

[Wuz]

i don't get how people believe the psx movies are that higher quality - i've dumped them all to avi and converted to mpeg and compared with the pc movies and they are identical.

If you play the psx vids in your media player, and then play the pc vids in your media player, and the pc version looks considerably worse, you must have ffdshow decoding true motion avi's or something.

PC:

PSX:


PC:

PSX:


PC:

PSX:


are you re-encoding the files to 640 X 480 so that there is no grainy stretching and does it work fine in game?
thats the only thing i'd bother doing - IF it works.

[cromas]

..yeah, i tried someting similair to this, but i noticed a slowdown in the movies, and mis-synching of video/audio.

I haven't had that problem. Perhaps due to the codecs you chose/speed of your system/etc etc.

i don't get how people believe the psx movies are that higher quality - i've dumped them all to avi and converted to mpeg and compared with the pc movies and they are identical.

Part of the reason your videos look identical is because of the way you went about it. That sounds like one, possibly two encodings where, depending on the codecs used, a significant amount of quality could have been lost.

Here's a comparison from boogdown, PSX and PC version. I pixel-scaled these x2.

PSX frame 1

PC frame 1


The PSX version is quite a bit clearer (look at the starfield), but the PC version actually has more image visible; look at the pink "cactus" in the bottom middle. There's also a clear color difference, the orbit lines are a much deeper red in the PC version, they are much more orange in the PSX. I would hypothesize that the PC version was not created from the PSX originals but from some other renderings, which would have probably been 320x240 in size. Those renders would then have been color-corrected, as television color is a bit different than PC color, and then resized to 320x224 for compatibility reasons. The interpolation involved would have introduced the blurriness.

Here is an animation that fades between the two frames. The difference is significant. This raises interesting concerns in replacing these videos -- if I simply drop the reencoded PSX videos in, they may not match the backgrounds of the PC version. I loaded up an old save and checked it -- the PSX videos actually line up better with the backgrounds, at least for the boogdown/up sequences. Interesting.

[Covarr]

Wuz, the images you posted were, in fact, NOT identical. Apart from the minor alignment differences that cromas already mentioned, the pics from the PC version appear considerably more burned out, much like overexposed film.

[Wuz]

my apologies, i didn't mean identical - i noticed the difference in my screenshots.
I meant the difference is negligible as far as i'm concerned.
IF the movies were resampled to 640 X 480 and encoded at that resolution (and FF7 would accept them and not stretch them) it would be worthwhile.
my mpeg encodings would have lost some detail but it was still a conversion to raw AVI then raw MPEG so i would'nt have thought a considerable amount of quality difference.

[cromas]

IF the movies were resampled to 640 X 480 and encoded at that resolution (and FF7 would accept them and not stretch them) it would be worthwhile.

I disagree. I think the boogdown example proves there is a significant qualitative difference in (at least some) of the videos. Stretching to 640x480 would not only introduce resampling blurriness, but it would take approximately four times the space. I don't want a 4GB movie directory.

[EmperorSteele]

There is higher quality of the psx movies... when viewed in ff7, there's less graphic distortion.  It's JUST BARELY noticable, but still, I'm all for even the smallest improvements.

[Wuz]

IF the movies were resampled to 640 X 480 and encoded at that resolution (and FF7 would accept them and not stretch them) it would be worthwhile.

I disagree. I think the boogdown example proves there is a significant qualitative difference in (at least some) of the videos. Stretching to 640x480 would not only introduce resampling blurriness, but it would take approximately four times the space. I don't want a 4GB movie directory.

I figured a properly resampled encode to 640 X 480 would look better than the FF7 engine stretching them.
kind of like resampling an image in photoshop compared to stretching it in mspaint.
as for the space... xvid?

EDIT: scratch that, FF7 won't accept 640 X 480 avi's

[cromas]

I figured a properly resampled encode to 640 X 480 would look better than the FF7 engine stretching them.
kind of like resampling an image in photoshop compared to stretching it in mspaint.

I don't think the FF7 engine does any stretching, I'm pretty sure it's all handled by the video framework in Windows. The fact that you can make out the graniness is probably just because you/we're not used to watching 320x240 movies in full screen.

[Wuz]

good point.

[Kenshinbtt]

im really having trouble with both greatpit and the biglight avi could you please send them to my e-mail www.onewhurules@gmail.com i'd appreciate it

[Terid__K]

Huhhh, I never had any crashing problems with PC movie files. And I've played through the game several times.

[Marc]

Your movie files must be corrupted.

An easy fix is to replace them with a copy of any other movie from the game and rename said movie to greatpit.avi and biglight.avi since I'm assuming you already play movies from HDD for your request to make any sense,

You won't see the original movie but at least you'll move on.