Nekochan Net

Hello, I am a fairly new Smoke user on Oct2 (2 years) and am almost a complete noob at IRIX and SGI.

I was courious about this MPLayer that has been developed.

It appears that I can use it to convert video to file seq. New(er)video codec seem to be available for import that aren't currently availabel through SGI/Discreet. Mainly the newer QT and mpeg2 codecs.

Does anyone use this software for such purposes? I assume it is all commandline driven on IRIX and no GUI.

I would look at the documentation but it is unavailable on the Mplayer site.

I am courious that if this program installs codecs to SGI then I wonder if Discreet could write it in to read those codecs as well if they are available.

Any info would be helpful. Thanks.

BKM

As far as I know the mplayer codecs are compiled in and it uses ffmpeg as decoder, so all mpeg formats should be supported including AVC (I hope).

You can get all the commandline options by mplayer --help, the file sequence output is an output plugin (-vo tga?).

Yep, mplayer is real handy for this but it's completely seperate to Irix's quicktime support.

I wrote a little script because I do this so often:


Not the cleanest script in the world but it works. You can either use it from a shell (targify blah.mov) or you can drag'n'drop video files onto it if you have the Irix desktop turned on which probably you don't if you're running Smoke. For a file "input.mov" it would make a folder "input.mov targas" filled with 00001.tga, 00002.tga, etc, which you can import as an image sequence.

There's better ways to do this... it would go faster if mplayer could output to .sgi files since Flame/Smoke can read them much faster than .tga's. It might also be possible to use the libio tools to move the frames onto the Stone as they're decoded... I shall investigate...

Interesting... I'll have to experiment with this. I still wonder how the codecs live on the system and if Discreet could access if they wrote for it...

thanks for the help... any other tidbits will still be usefull.

BKM

yep, sgi-fileout would be handy. shake as well dislikes tga's and wants to be fed with sgi/rgb or iff instead. i guess is this a general issue and not solely related to ffi.

btw. mplayer rocks, now if only it could output to video directly. die crappy "only jpeg-movies are supported"-dmplay. die die die!

Lewis provides a starting script.

http://www.fxguide.com/fxtips-257.html has an article on doing this, but they too use tgas for output. Of course, if you want to take the time, you could always have a seperate script that converts TGA files to some other format.

It looks like writing a basic mplayer vo plugin should be easy, but it also looks like it gets complicated fast with alpha features, OSD features, and drawing slices rather than full frames. I think you could at least ignore the Alpha and OSD for fileout plugins, but you might want to keep them for videoout.

I've just discovered that mplayer makes a total pig's ear of decoding PAL DV. It seems to be interlacing the chroma when it shouldn't be. You get two-pixel high field-like artifacts even after deinterlacing, or even when viewing one field. Anyone else seeing this? No clue how to fix... bit of a bummer... it might well do it for other 4:2:0 formats too, don't have anything to hand to check with. The output is very different to what I see on Windows or with Quicktime. Darn!

Bummer. Err, doesn't Irix handle DV in dmconvert?

Yeah, but only as raw DV, aka .dif, aka dvstream files. Not AVIs or Quicktimes AFAIK.

We wrote something similar inhouse to dump QT's and so on directly to the discreet stone FS. Not difficult to implement, but handy, very handy...

Anyone know which version of the libav codec the IRIX mplayer has? Can we update this to support H264? I should probably start a new thread for this... Just curious if we can grab the latest libavcodec from CVS and use that...

J

Did your inhouse thing work with DV? What codec/library did you use, ffmpeg?