Having fun with HAM8 videos @ 25 FPS for 3+ minutes

[atron]

Hi guys, in recent months I got back into actually doing something with my Amiga again. First, I ripped out this old green battery and after I had assembled the whole thing again, I got into a conversation with a friend about the capabilities of the Amiga. So I came up with the idea having the Amiga show a video of about 3-4 mins on an HD flat screen in exactly the same way as a PC does in full screen mode (in 16:9 format); in principle, that should be possible (I guessed

Looking around on youtube I found some converted videos playing on an Amiga, but all with lots of conversion artifacts, or just very short.

My goal became to create a HAM8 video where each frame has its own color palette and a *very* small (if at all) number of artifacts. Finally I found one tool, released in 2015, that gives excellent HAM8 results whereas other tools have some disadvantages:
* ppmtoilbm: generates a fixed grey palette. The result is to get several conversion artefacts.
* avi4hv doesn't generate separate palettes either. The player is well done (and fast), but the converted frames have lots of artifacts (didn't try avi4aga yet, but I guess it doesn't create different color palettes either?).

The best HAM8 converter I found is png2ilbm. It was released 2014/15 and generates really good HAM8 pictures: http://bgafc.t-hosting.hu/prgv.php?p=2

Players: cyberanim cannot play anim videos with different color palettes. I used viewtek to play the video.

My procedure was to decode it with ffmpeg into separate frames (=files), convert each frame to HAM8, and use the Amiga tool animconvert to put it into one anim file again.

Finally, I came up with a 3min video playing at 25 FPS (320x251) with a very small number of artifacts. Even text (black on an almost white wall) displays well in the presence of other colors.

The final video (with added original music) can be seen here:
[youtube]WwWEtXd_vDo[/youtube]

PS: I havent't tried AnimFX and Wavetracer yet (just learned about them some days ago). I'd be interested if anybody knows if they generate separate color palettes and what the HAM8 quality is (in comparison to the original video).

[atron]

Pretty cool, is the ham8 anim available somewhere? Would like to see how it appears on my various systems

I am not distributing this anim file because it contains copyrighted content.
However, I can convert an other video if you send me a link.

[atron]

Presumably it is "easy" to convert from what you have to a full CDXL file with audio?  You might have to lose some resolution though, I think CDXL only supports up to 3/4 screen resolution (although that may well have been a limit to what the hardware could play back, rather than the format).

Yes CDXL looks interesting, but I couldn't find any player nor converter  for it. My main interest then became to use this new HAM8 converter  (png2ilbm, released in 2015) as it produces excellent HAM8 conversion  results. If the HAM8 conversion of a CDXL converter is of similar  quality and it also adds sound, then that would of course be awesome  (however, playing sound also requires some resources, etc.)

[atron]

Here are two of mine with sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnwSStRQjs
Real Amiga hardware.

I like this one, looks quite convenient with mainactor. It's also similar to what I did by loading it into memory. But why are the colors so different compared to the original video? Is this mainactor's HAM8 conversion or some other conversion effect?

What I mean is:
Original video at 3:05 : https://youtu.be/xyfu8pv5nws?t=3m5s
Your video at 1:46 : https://youtu.be/fJnwSStRQjs?t=1m46s
(the links should take you directly to the right frames)

In the original video Scrat's space suit is grey and his head is brown, but in your video Scrat's space suit is brown-ish and his head is blue!

So the sound file is loaded as a separate file? In principle I could do the same then, just need to play it with mainactor and figure out how to create this sound file format! Is it playing the iffs from memory, but the aiff sound file from disk?

[atron]

XLMake looks like it quite simply takes a batch of IFF files and compiles them into a CDXL. It has an audio option but I don't really understand it.

That's a nice website. convert2cdxl looks like the most convenient way of converting to CDXL. It converts it to videos with only 12 frames/s (hopefully there is a way to tweak this .

[atron]

This is about the best I could do on real hardware with sound using MooVid

Looks nice. So this is running @80Mhz on your system? Is this playing from disk or memory?

[atron]

New Amiga 1200 HAM8 video player
https://youtu.be/zuKQncH32sE

Awesome!!! I got it working in fs-uae in A1200 mode.

Good to see that the playing of videos is now picking up (again) for classic Amigas! Let's keep the chipset melting

PS:  I couldn't get it working on my A4000, there appears to be something  A1200 specific hiding in it ... A3000 mode in fs-uae plays the sound,  but not the video. It does work in A1200 mode.

[atron]

Hi guys, finally I got some more tools working, wrote my own sound converter and "chunk shuffler" and can now get AnimFX running with sound and proper play rate. Here is a video with 5 HAM variants (HAM6/HAM8 with one shared palette and multiple palettes) and for dreamers a hires version. I can run V1-V4 on my Amiga, V5 is (as expected) too slow on my Amiga - but it is fast enough in FS-UAE ... which made me wonder a bit ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQg7CcgQqOU

CDXL works too @ 25 FPS in lores for V1 without blit option (but  flicker) (in PIO-4 setting), and it  does appear to be fast enough - unfortunately I never got the CDXL  player working with multiple color palettes in HAM mode.

Next I may look at my CD32 or Picasso IV with MPEG (RIVA player is much better in skipping frames while still keeping the music playing properly) or I start writing my own HAM player ..

[atron]

Very cool.
Just for the heck of it, did you try PAL Hires Laced?

No, because the full video wouldn't fit into memory But the short  one would fit, yeah worth a try. I still remember these laced modes on  my 1081 monitor .. that's why I probably avoided it also in lores

[atron]

Here is a video with 5 HAM variants (HAM6/HAM8 with one shared palette and multiple palettes) and for dreamers a hires version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQg7CcgQqOU

HI Guys,  I just found out that one of the tools that I used for converting the  pictures, png2ilbm, doesn't support HAM and the generated frames in  versions V3-V5 in this video are actually "only" AGA8 frames! Hence,  there might be even more possible (png2ilbm does an awesome job in  converting to AGA though). Versions V1 and V2 are indeed HAM videos.

[atron]

And here is now a HAM8 video with color count ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR3VC7QodFM

[youtube]nR3VC7QodFM[/youtube]

The video description also contains sizes&color counts of downscaled variants of the same video as well. AGA8 doesn't look much different, anyways, the fun-part was the HAM8 decoder to compute the color count