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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Why CineForm Rules Supreme

September 12th, 2007

When I first started to approach other companies in the games industry with a view to licensing the Digital Foundry hardware, typically the only negative responses tended to be…

1. Why do you CineForm HD compression? Nobody else does and we want to use Final Cut Pro.
2. Why use compression at all? We want precision quality (this is a common attitude with games developers, who would fall in love with CineForm if they put it to the test!).

Well let’s tackle point two first, with a very simply exercise. Take a look at the image below from an Xbox 360 Gears of War cut-scene. One image was captured completely uncompressed. The other was taken with CineForm HD. We’ve zoomed in on a specific part of the image and blown it up to 200%. This proves conclusively that while not mathematically lossless, you lose virtually nothing by using CineForm and you gain so much - easy integration with multiple editing systems, relatively tiny file sizes (anything up to 15:1 compression), plus you can capture onto a single 7,200rpm SATA drive. No more need for stupidly expensive SCSI RAID arrays.
Want some more quality tests? Download this ZIP package of shots. Open an uncompressed HDMI image in Photoshop. Zoom in to 300%, 400% - whatever you like. Import the CineForm version of the same image, CTRL-A, CTRL-C and CTRL-V into your uncompressed window. Use CTRL-Z to undo the paste, then again to re-do it - rinse and repeat. Now you’re switching between the two images at a stupendously magnified rate. Impressive eh?
It’s all the more impressive considering the chosen subject matter. Video games have little in the way of natural blurring (eg camera focused on the foreground, background out of focus) so it’s notoriously hard to compress. Secondly, there’s the sheer level of detail in games these days - another compression nightmare. And thirdly, two of the three games in the test package run at 1280×720 at 60 frames per second. Every frame is different, making compression even harder. But CineForm copes easily with any eventuality. No other codec I’ve tested can.
Point one now. Nowadays, CineForm HD is now pretty much the only cross-platform HD codec on the market. Digital Foundry HD AVI captures can be losslessly rewrapped into the Quicktime MOV format (the bitstream is literally identical) and now both PC and Intel Mac owners can use our captures. Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro - now pretty much all editors can make use of superior HD assets, with Avid the only hold-outs.

Gears of War on Xbox 360, cropped and zoomed in to 200% - uncompressed on the left, CineForm on the right - not that the human eye can really tell the difference. And the really scary thing? This was taken at CineForm quality level ‘High’… there are two more settings offering an even better quality match. We simply don’t need to use them.

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