Why was the Saturn so dogshit at FMVs? They had to shrink the aspect ratio everytime a game had one? It's so much beefier than a PS1 so what gives?
>>12606074Saturn isn't as good as the PS1 with FMVs, hell even 3DO might be equal or slightly better but the PC-FX mogs them all when it comes to FMV.
>daily saturn hate thread number #4929432kill yourself now
>>12606084But what's the technical reason behind it
>>12606074PSX had a dedicated FMV decoder chip built in, Saturn used software decoding. Most titles used Cinepack which was garbage, or Duck Truemotion which was the great grandpa of VP8/VP9 encoding used in WebM videos and youtube (so, also garbage).You can use the MPEG card to make the Saturn have better quality FMVs than the PSX, since it had a better chip than the MJPEG decoder in the PSX. But only something like 2-3 games used it to improve existing videos (Gungriffon is one), and only one title required it to work (Lunar) and that was a fucking Sega CD port. The devkits really didn't have proper tools to use the MPEG card.
saturn was shit at transparencies too. the saturn version of SoTN was just the most dogshit thing imaginable. if the team who made it new what they were doing it could have been good, but konami just handed it to a group that shat it out so it *would* be on the saturn.
>>12606093>But only something like 2-3 gamesIt's twice that but the remaining half aren't that exciting to the average Retro Gamer™
>>12606146Ayrton Senna Pro Talking is not a game.
>>12606170There is also Vatlva, Moon Cradle, Dead Heat, Sentimental Graffiti and the Falcom Classics CD (not a game, but a bonus disc to a game; but still counts as FMV on Saturn)
The Gayga Shiturd
>>12606074The developers knew that Saturn owners have myopia and would sit closer to the screen anyways. They had to compensate for this somehow. Otherwise, the cutscenes would appear too big.
>>12606074>big dumb analog stick put on the saturn controllerwhat the fuck lol
>>12606074The Saturn isn't dogshit at FMVs, KCEN was just incompetent:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-7-IGOA0ws>>12606084The 3DO and Saturn are equal in this sense as they both rely on Software codecs. If anything Saturn would have the edge simply due to it having more CPU power.>>12606093Cinepak isn't really a bad codec, it's actually pretty good and can stand toe to toe with PS1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8p29EgEdBohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTFunbFq0xQThe issue is most devs were either retarded with the encoder or sabotaged their own FMV quality by playing it back at 15-bit color instead of 24-bit color for no good reason:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-885ZgJGyRkGale Racer, Virtual Hydlide, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Astal, All Treasure games, Saturn Bomberman, etc. all do this. If a Saturn game's Cinepak FMV looks bad it's either due to bad encoding or using 15-bit color playback.
>>12606571Go back to bed, Trekkies.
>>12606576Make me.
>>12606126>if the team who made it new what they were doing >newwrong word, Vikram
>>12606571Having the knowledge to do this in 1996+30 doesn't mean the knowledge was widespread in 2026-30. FMVs were still recent tech that everyone was still learning; and this is why the PSX's decoder chip made all the difference, the job was already done.Look, I appreciate your translations and shit, but I'm tired of every modern romhacker larping like they're better than the devs of old. You're better BECAUSE the devs of old left you 30 years of knowledge and centralized all the information for you to use effortlessly.
>>12606074Sony had the best engineers
>>12606074>>12606085It's called the Gayga Shiturd just in case you forgot>>12606237Yep
>>12606571/threadzoomies btfo
>>12606237Snoy Pisstation
>>12607306Those were encoded with the exact same tools devs had access to back in the 90s. The Cinepak encoding pipeline is literally just using Quicktime on a vintage Mac.> this is why the PSX's decoder chip made all the difference, the job was already done.The job was already done on the Saturn too in that sense. Sega was shipping a very efficient Cinepak decoding library with the earliest Saturn devkits that supported both 15-bit and 24-bit decoding. The main difference is Sony's encoder was more idiot proof and had it's default settings set to 15fps and high quality which results in a better looking encode because you have more bitrate per frame. Quicktime defaults to 30fps and low-medium quality. That's going to give poor results, and it's no coincidence that a lot of bad looking Saturn FMVs are at 30fps.>Look, I appreciate your translations and shit, but I'm tired of every modern romhacker larping like they're better than the devs of old.And I'm tired of people like you who have never even looked into how any of this works and assumes it must be hard or some crazy black magic. This shit was well known even back in the 90s and was built around industry standard tools like Quicktime and early versions of Adobe Premiere. There was nothing unknown or crazy that required 30 years of knowledge to pull off. All I did was the crazy thing of reading the fucking manual that was included with Sega's devkits and applying common sense with bitrate management. There were plenty of devs who figured this out back in the 90s as well. Look at Capcom's output. Megaman 8, Resident Evil, etc. all have great looking FMV quality because they understood how to use the encoder and that 24-bit playback looks better. The same is true with Tengai Makyou, that's some of the best looking FMV quality on the system.
>>12607306>>12608776And to drive this home further, here's examples of games from back in the 90s with good quality Cinepak FMVs:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gqC3ntPUe0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u776o7zQ_ishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y94Orj1Ss8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VRN3k3HFUohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiEyUqXvesIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYflySGyQOohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYiDUeczXDQ
>>12606074>it's so much beefierdid you make the mistake of combining cpu clock frequencies?main reason why psx motion video works well is because it had hardware support for itthe saturn had an optional MPEG/VCD card available for it, but people would eventually reason "optional" means "never". game devs don't want to target optional addons, it reduces their user-base. without the MPEG card the saturn can only do video in software, while the playstation had hardware for this, not as good as MPEG, but better than average for 1994.
>>12608825MDEC is just MJPEG with some slight modifications to skirt around licensing issues. So it has all the pros and cons that come with that. The pro is that it uses hardware accelerated JPEG compression which can look very nice. The downside is it's all keyframes with no interframe compression. So having the same 300KB/s bitrate means the JPEG compression gets jacked up pretty high resulting in some pretty nasty JPEG artifacts, especially when you are trying to do full screen at more than 15fps. It also means your FMVs will take up more disc space.Software codecs like Cinepak and Truemotion do have interframe compression so you can sometimes get a nicer looking encode at framerates higher framerates. It also helps with size as you can get comparable quality with smaller file sizes and not end up needing as many discs. Final Fantasy VII for example would probably only need 2 discs on Saturn with comparable FMV quality.
>>12606084Saturn isn't as good as the Sega CD with FMVs.
>>12608910Oh no it's TeamAndromeda...
>>1260657115 bit has some banding but at least it's sharp. That 24bit one looks like N64 vaseline shit.
>>12606571>it's actually pretty good and can stand toe to toe with PS1nah, bro, try again
>>12606126>SoTN was just the most dogshit thingCastlevania games are dogshit in general
>Saturn isn't as good as the PS1 with FMVs/vr/ is crowded with hilarious mouth breathers with whimsical second hand opinions. There was a reason why Sony loved to prey on you morons.
>>12608776If the knowledge was that simple and widespread cases like SotN wouldn't exist and nobody would have felt the need to make the MPEG card>>12608812The ones that have direct counterparts on PSX look worse than on PSX, MM8 for instance has worse quality and slightly lower resolution>>12608825Devs didn't need to make releases specifically requiring the MPEG card unless it had a shit ton of FMVs; most of the games with MPEG support also have those same FMVs in lower quality if you don't use the card>>12608812
>>12608839i'm not interested in the console war part. while you are correct that cinepak can do inter-frame coding (in the form of skipping unchanged blocks, similar to how GIF can technically do inter-frame coding) and is actually intended for video, it's also an extremely basic video codec, it's even older than jpeg itself. it doesn't encode still frames as efficiently as jpeg, and what little interframe coding it has can barely make up for it. inter-frame coding didn't start to get gud until mpeg, though it's a bit unfair to compare them directly since cinepak targeted running on cpus from 1991, while mpeg practically required a hardware decoder when it came out due to its' complexity.
>>12606074No video codecsThere's an expansion bay that upgraded the Saturns video capabilities, unfortunately it only got used in a few games
