New Hardware Announcement: Mobile Capture with Digital Foundry HDScope

March 22nd, 2009

Digital Foundry is pleased to announce its new entry-level unit, designed for ultra-mobile, quality-focused high definition capture. Primarily aimed at video games media outlets, HDScope is a portable computer with an integrated 7″ widescreen touchscreen display, measuring just 30.5 x 20 x 18.5cm and weighing around 5kg. Simply plug into the mains, connect to any component or unencrypted HDMI source and you’re instantly recording superb quality video.
HDScope works best with 720p, but also supports 480i/576i and 1080i. Video and audio passthrough allows you to use HDScope as an intermediate ‘bridge’. Connect your source to the unit, and the unit to your HD display and you have full realtime gameplay on the main screen while HDScope’s touchscreen is used for preview and recording functionality.
Digital Foundry’s customary support for CineForm HD is included, along with two lossless codecs - the freeware UT Codec Pack and the shareware AMV Codec.  AMV also includes multiple lossy options; not quite in CineForm’s league for ultra-precision capture, but still remarkable. All recorded clips can be played back in realtime on HDScope’s integrated touchscreen.

Digital Foundry HDScope, capturing Dead or Alive 4 on Xbox 360. All recording functionality can be carried out via 7″ LCD touchscreen, with AV passthrough options allowing you to retain gameplay on the big screen. Keyboard, mouse and monitor can also be attached, transforming HDScope into a powerful small form factor PC.

HDScope’s performance on 720p video is akin to TrueHD in its YPrPb 4:2:2 mode. The new hardware lacks signature Digital Foundry 24-bit RGB support, as this is an entry level product with a corresponding feature set, but the quality level is still exemplary. Here’s a quartet of Dead of Alive 4 shots. DOA’s lack of anti-aliasing, it’s mind-melting strobing colour schemes and ultra-fast v-locked 60fps gameplay make it a nightmare to compress - ideal testing material. Click on the thumbnails for full 720p screenshots taken directly from the captured video.

The top shots show CineForm compression at work, revealing that even in this ultra-stress test, it’s still the best quality vs filesize codec in town. The shots at the bottom are extracted from lossless captures acquired by the HDScope in the same session.

Some random HDScope facts: universal power supply means it’ll work anywhere worldwide… CineForm compression means optimum quality and at least 20 hours of 720p60 video at ultra-precision quality on HDScope’s 1TB hard disk… includes typical Digital Foundry variable frame rate selection - why capture a 30fps game at 60fps and waste valuable hard disk space?… use HD Fury 2 to capture from any HDCP encrypted source…  inexpensive adaptor available to capture Wii 480p… carry case also available!

Should HDScope prove to be popular, expect a TrueHD 1080p capable unit to be introduced.

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New Hardware Announcement: 1080p Notebook Capture with TrueHD Mobile

December 17th, 2008

Take a custom-built notebook, an ExpressCard to PCI Express interface and the Digital Foundry TrueHD Express capture card and this is what you have - 1080p video acquisition in a complete package that weighs just 3.2kg. They say that a picture’s better than a thousand words, so let’s up the ante a touch with a hastily put-together, but quite illuminating video.

A welcome return to our old friend Ridge Racer 7, capturing directly into the CineForm codec at 1080p via TrueHD Mobile. To give some sense of scale, that’s a 13.3″ sub-notebook.

No hardware has been altered here. You can remove the TrueHD Express card from the enclosure, and run it in your PC for all the benefits outlined here. But card performance on the notebook is reduced from PCIe x4 bandwidth down to PCIe x1. In real terms, that’s 720p60 and 1080p30 at 8-bit YUY2 (courtesy of CineForm compression) and 720p30 and 1080p15 at 24-bit RGB, via the lossless codec. Bearing in mind speed limitations on notebook hard disks, you can’t really ask for much more. While the notebook can run from batteries, the enclosure itself requires mains power, that’s pretty much the only major limitation.
Otherwise, as it’s the same hardware, there’s support for component, VGA, DVI and HDMI and crucially, the quality of the assets between desktop TrueHD and the mobile iteration remains identical.

A selection of Ridge Racer 7 1080p screenshots taken directly from the TrueHD Mobile captures encoded in the CineForm codec. Quality level is identical to the standard-setting desktop version. Click on the thumbnails for the full-size shots.

So… obvious question out of the way first. Why custom-build the laptop? The short answer is that my Dell XPS M1330, using the same core parts, didn’t work properly. I’d expect the same to be true of many different notebooks, depending on the BIOS. Right now I’d also rule out using Vista for the OS too. It drains too much power, particularly on the graphics card. Our realtime scalable preview window needs all the juice it can get there.
Things might (probably) change with the new Centrino 2 based notebooks - higher FSB, faster CPUs, more memory bandwidth. You’re looking at a Core 2 system of 2.6GHz or better, integrated GPU, and a nice, fast SATA notebook drive to allow the hardware to truly flourish.

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Digital Foundry on the Big, Bright Screen

September 19th, 2008

Question: how do you go about displaying real time PlayStation 3 gameplay on a screen the size of a wall? That’s the intriguing question posed by my new friends at Belgium big-screen specialists Brightboard. The obvious answer would be to use projection, but in daylight conditions, obviously this would be a complete waste of time.
Brightboard specialise in the use of LED screens - similar to the kind of displays used in football pitch ad hoardings, and also for displaying advertising in city centres. Such screens are absolutely enormous and require dedicated PCs to control the image. That being the case, direct connection from console to screen is not the solution - a capture card, interfaced with the LED screen’s controller is. Enter Digital Foundry TrueHD Express.
This was a great case to work on. Brightboard sent me a copy of their controller software and with just a couple of registry tweaks to the TrueHD driver I was able to get realtime PS3 gameplay working with no problem whatsoever. However, without an actual screen to work with, positive results could not be guaranteed, so it was with some trepidation that the TrueHD Express card was sent to Belgium…

Success! Click on the pics for some idea of just how massive that LED screen actually is. Multiple screens can be daisy-chained together for an even more colossal image.

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Update: PS3 Media Playback

August 24th, 2008

First of all, kudos to Sony for producing what I think must be the first 1080p60 AVC file to playback on PlayStation 3. Posters on the AVSForum tipped me off to the 1080p download available at WipEout HD website. Encoded at 20mbps with peaks at 49mbps, it’s a worthy workout for the PS3 - but it’s a shame that the gameplay footage has so much v-lock screen tear.
The video is also noteworthy in that I could not match this performance initially whatsoever, despite matching its encoding profile as closely as I could using x264. It turns out that the video divides the image into ’slices’ which PS3’s Cell CPU decode in parallel… and x264 doesn’t support slices.
However, the Mainconcept Reference encoder does and while it’s horrible to use compared to x264, I quickly had 1080p60 material playing back nicely. I’ll have to consider updating the Devil May Cry demo on DigitalFoundry.org to replace the existing VC-1 encode as I get the same quality at a lower bitrate and AVC is clearly more suited to the PS3’s media playback capabilities. That’s if I can find someone with the full version to do the encode for me, as the demo version watermarks output and I’m not paying $1,999 for an encoder that is inferior to x264 in just about every way.

PlayStation 3 WipEout HD supports 1080p60 (with one or two interesting technical tricks I might go into at a later date) and the AVC video Sony produced for it is well worth downloading and checking out on your own PS3…

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1080p60 Video Playback: PS3 Supreme

August 8th, 2008

It’s all very well having hardware capable of 1080p60 capture; the only problem is that once you have created your wondrous edit, the only playback mechanism available is a quad core PC running the CineForm NEO Player software. Great (incredible, actually) for event usage on a huge display, not so great for final asset delivery to the masses.
Sure, 1080p30 can be played back with much aplomb on both Xbox 360 and PS3, but all my previous efforts in getting demanding video working at full fat 1080p60 have failed miserably, with only mediocre 1440×1080 performance possible via the Xbox 360’s dashboard WMV player.
PlayStation 3 recently had VC1 decoding added to its media playback arsenal and it’s outperforming my 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad system, and indeed the Xbox 360. Easily. My previous 1440×1080 anamorphic edits which gave 360 ‘pause’ play back beautifully on PS3. Handle the encode carefully and the PS3 will even stream 40mbps VC1 without a hitch!
Sure, there are limitations with Sony’s console, as you might expect from a consumer-level piece of hardware bent over and molested at gunpoint into doing things it really doesn’t want to do. In an ideal world, you’d want to use all of the encoding power of VC1 - in-loop and overlap filters, dequant, true chroma motion estimation, B frames, the works. But in dealing with 60 frames, the poor old PS3 simply can’t cope. The answer is to turn off varying amounts of this stuff and compensate with sheer bandwidth. The amount you’ll need will vary with your source material but for 1080p60 you’re looking at the top end.
So… what’s the catch? Weirdly, PS3 supports VC1, but support is patchy for the Microsoft audio codecs. Plus you need to ‘Enable WMA audio’ on the XMB, which nobody ever bothers doing any way. The answer is to demux the WMV, transcode audio into ac3 then plonk everything into a transport stream (.ts) container.
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. My whole objective here is to get some semblance of the magnificence of TrueHD 1080p60 captures but playable on everyday hardware; getting that level of quality is going to take some time, so no downloadable goodies for now, but at least now I know it’s actually possible…

Kudos to Microsoft for Expression Encoder 2 and its 30 day trial period I’m ruthlessly exploiting as we speak. It’s based on the same code that produced spectacular VC1 encodes for HD DVD and Blu-ray, but it ain’t cheap at $199. However, encoding quality seems to leaps beyond Microsoft’s previous Windows Media Encoder offering

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