Sorry, poor choice of words. And yes i know what Team Avalanche is doing. I did kind of start it after all.
I know, I just thought it was kind of an odd 'huh moment too me. Don't worry we aren't out to get you ... yet.
That 'polishing coprolites' article was interesting (they did misspell it however). I didn't know people were obsessed about such strange things. Very useful however in archaeology to see what people were eating and how healthy they were (I bet you are not surprised). I just had a Conkers Bad Fur day vision (hehehe).
Erstwhile, for TA it would be interesting to render the same sequence using POV for it. They finally made it SMPS functional etc so it can get beyond the 1000pps on some of the more intense scenes. Compression of the data might prove to be interesting. However enough of this about that I guess.
As I said earlier AVISynth is an excellent video tool. It surpasses many commercial packages, it's most interesting ability is to be able to read almost ANY type of video. The Motion JPEGs on the PS1 are particularly nasty bits because of how the data is stored (and windows doesn't read ALL the data because it doesn't support Mode 2 type 1 data in the ISO it just supports CD audio <mode 0> data as it is).
That's the big problem with getting the video data out of the PlayStation files. The audio (ADPCM) uses the full sector (2304 bytes) and the video uses the 2048 first bytes. So it is possible to get the video.
The thing about decoding and improving that video data is as I said earlier it's DCT data. Now DCT data is dimensionless (IE it's not constrained to pixel size per sea), increasing the resolution however is not a subject I understand well however. I know how it works etc. but adding data (think of an 8x8 block of pixels that had the DCT performed on them. the DCT is dimensionless data so the block size must be ASSUMED to be or have information that it 8x8), I suppose this is where quarter and sub pixel compression becomes handy for anti-aliasing purposes. Another thing is simply moving from using integer DCT to a floating point based one can significantly improve the results. I believe the IDCT is a bit loss-y and has enough truncation error it creates other issues with the image data (namely it doesn't compress as well because of the noise it introduces). To see what I am talking about just load an image in GIMP (just do a SHIFT-print screen then press SHIFT CTRL V) then go to save it as a JPEG. Select show preview in window and then look at the compressed size, then go to the advanced options and go to DCT methods select floating point and see what the new size is. It will be slightly smaller. On a less manufactured image (IE say a person) the difference is larger.
Anyhow I think it might be a better idea to use the TA video data when available (even if you just want enhanced movies and nothing else). The amount of work necessary to improve the original data will become close to the same as making all new data (as you people are doing). Geesh the number of things that go through ones mind.
Cyb
