Amiga specific content

[Tenacious]

A few years back, it was easy to find movie clips and other media that played well on OS 3.9.  I registered Riva for mpegs and MooVid for AVIs &  movs and was pleased with their performance.  Now, it seems their codecs are out of date.  It seems Microsoft and Apple are in a race for market share and COULD be changing the codecs as often as possible for their own benefit.  True?  (Thankfully, the mp3 format does not seem to be evolving at the same pace. grin)

How does an Amiga user catch the latest Harry Potter sneak-peak trailer on his favorite machine?  A. Get new codecs for the viewers listed above? (Are any available?)  B. Use an older version of Quicktime on a real Mac and convert the files to an older codec?  C.  Find a website where others have done these conversions already and posted (legal copyright issues?) the results?  D. Use a video format (open source) not controlled by greedy corporations?  (Yes, I acknowlege that some of the change is genuine improvement.) Are there new Amiga players?  I don't think that I have the horsepower for Frogger.

Maybe others have solved this and I'm simply out of touch. I would love to hear what the rest of you are doing.

[Gerbinist]

Watching trailers has always been a "no go" area on the Amiga for me. For movies I always did the following:

- search for a vcd/svcd release (they still come out) and use the bin/cue combo to burn the disc with MakeCD and watch it on the standalone.

- Divx/avi compatible dvd players did the trick for me after that as I just burned the .avi and watched it on the standalone aswell (mine even supports .srt for subtitles)

[Piru]

It seems Microsoft and Apple are in a race for market share and COULD be changing the codecs as often as possible for their own benefit. True?

No. Those amiga players are just old and outdated.

I'm using mplayer on MorphOS, and I can watch almost all clips (except wmv). Source code for mplayer is freely available, but I'm afraid classic doesn't have the horsepower.

[balrogsoft]

I bought Amiga OS 3.9 recently, and i made some test with video players on my A1200 030/50 Mhz, i played some mov files with moovid at fullscreen and realtime without sound scratches, but the size was very small 160x120 or 176x144, i downloaded some video converters for PC, and i converted some videos to mov, and i got working videos, i don't remember the program, but was a shareware demo. Now i have my Amiga 1200 mounted on a Xtreme box tower with Mediator 1200 but i can't get it work, i hope that using a video card it will work better, AGA modes are not the best for Video.

[Varthall]

Piru wrote:

It seems Microsoft and Apple are in a race for market share and COULD be changing the codecs as often as possible for their own benefit. True?

No. Those amiga players are just old and outdated.

I'm using mplayer on MorphOS, and I can watch almost all clips (except wmv). Source code for mplayer is freely available, but I'm afraid classic doesn't have the horsepower.

I use MPlayer for trailers on my A1, too, and apart from wmv there are also some QT ones that don't have audio/video or both due to missing codecs.

Varthall

[mikeymike]

Piru wrote:

It seems Microsoft and Apple are in a race for market share and COULD be changing the codecs as often as possible for their own benefit. True?

No. Those amiga players are just old and outdated.

I'm using mplayer on MorphOS, and I can watch almost all clips (except wmv). Source code for mplayer is freely available, but I'm afraid classic doesn't have the horsepower.

Even my PC's CPU usage is pretty high when playing high-definition Quicktime trailers with QT7.  I imagine even the most upgraded classic Amigas would want to go home and cry rather than play HD content.

Admittedly there are still some non-HD Apple movie trailers, but I imagine Apple will phase those out within a year.

[Oli_hd]

B. Use an older version of Quicktime on a real Mac and convert the files to an older codec?

Well I use to just convert them using videodub or quicktime and copy them over.. it wasnt a major problem.
That said I dont play movies on the miggy any more. :-(

But I agree with the others, the 68K Amiga wouldnt be able to play the vid clips you download anyway, they are high resolution, high colour clips. OS4 and an A1 is the way.
(I did try and play a DVD on my PPC Amiga using Amp, it did very well but not good enough.. probably cause I didnt have a great deal of memory mind)

[Tenacious]

You will have to forgive my ignorance.  I have a G3 Mac and a late model Windows laptop.  Are there converts for these 2 platforms that will re-encode high-res, high-color videos back to older, lower-res formats?  Are they freeware?  GRin.

I only have several generations of the reader version of QuickTime (not Pro).   I need to RTFM, but I thought there was no saving ability.

I'm beginning to suspect that even if this could be done, there migt be copyright issues if the converted videos were distributed online.  It also begs the question, if a person can watch the video on new equipment, why convert it for the Amiga?  OK, Im only a little obsessed but still healthy.

[AmigaMance]

A few years back, it was easy to find movie clips and other media that played well on OS 3.9. I registered Riva for mpegs

 Good move. It's the fastest 68k player.

and MooVid for AVIs & movs and was pleased with their performance. Now, it seems their codecs are out of date.

 Not so good move as you have already saw. You should have registered FroggerNG which is better and supports more codecs.

Are there new Amiga players?

 MPlayer for MorphOS is still under slow development but you need a PPC card and it's slower than frogger anyway.

I don't think that I have the horsepower for Frogger.

 Yes, it's true that even the fastest 68060 can't cope with newer avi codecs like DivX. They are very CPU demanding and you can't do something about it, except of buying a CPPC.