[CCing Debian Games Team and Debian ftpmasters] On Sun, 2009-06-14 at 02:11 +0200, cybersphinx wrote: > Since I'm currently about to reencode the German video sequences for Warzone, I > remembered that you wrote about that to some Debian list and dug it up again, > to see if there were any answers to that. > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2009/04/msg00010.html doesn't list > any, did you really get none? Nope, I got no feedback on that email. ftpmasters, do you have any feedback based on the below additions? > > Upstream then converted these files via AVI format to Ogg (re-encoded in > > Vorbis & Theora) and packaged them up in a .wz file (ZIP file) for use by the > > game. > > The part you left out here is: Converted via a Windows program that can be > compiled with Wine but uses the DLLs of the original game (which were included > in the original source archive which claims its contents is under the GPL, > though there was no source code included for the DLLs, and not all of them seem > to be Eidos's property), and needs to be compiled and run on a 32 bit x86 > system (or possibly a 32 bit environment on a 64 bit system for the Wine > version). > > There was also an attempt to reverse engineer the codec, but as far as I know > that was never completed and picked up (due to the unclear status of the videos > at that time). Hmm, OK. I didn't know about this at the time I wrote that email. Is there really no free software support for decoding the RPL files? ffmpeg gives me this decoder in ffmpeg -formats: D rpl RPL/ARMovie format > > Would the ftpmasters require the 476MB sequences_rpl.tar.lzma to be uploaded > > to Debian? Do we have to convert them to Ogg at package build time or can we > > ship both the Ogg and RPL versions in the source package? > > As the above should have made clear, it is not possible to convert the RPL > files to OGG with free software (and make modifications to them either). That > leads me to believe that the "preferred form of the work for making > modifications to it" for those videos are the intermediate AVI files > (uncompressed data, absolutely no loss compared to the RPLs). > > For the German videos, those are ~7 GB, compressed with highest 7z compression > ~700 MB. Those could be converted via ffmpeg2theora to more or less any desired > size, you just need to write a little makefile/shell script/... I agree with your interpretations here. I wonder if lossless Dirac would be the best form for modification? This would probably make them highly compressed but still lossless, but would require lots of CPU for decoding. Alternatively ffmpeg's Snow codec might work but IIRC the codec format is not finalised. > > The result is 162MB and appears to be the same quality as the originals. > > This is definitely not the case, the 162 MB OGGs look _ugly_. They are blurry > and full of encoding artifacts. I've experimented a bit with encoding options, > and anything below the highest quality really leaves visible artifacts (at > least when viewed fullscreen on anything larger than a ~10" display). > > The ffmpeg2theora options I've used are "-v10 -K65536 --pp de/tn:64:128:256 > --optimize". That is, highest quality (I think the WRP videos used -v5, and > it's ugly, did I mention that?), keyframes all 65536 frames (since we don't > need to seek), filtering (some deblocking and temporal noise reduction), and, > well, optimization. > > The filtering removes some of the pixeliness of the originals, and improves > both look (imo) and compression ratio. The encoding was done with libtheora > 1.1alpha2, which didn't have any noticable quality regressions, but roughly 20% > smaller files. Those are now ~460 MB. Yeah, I agree about the ugliness, but part of that is simply the originals are low quality. BTW, if you could add a working Makefile to the source tarball or just in the directory where the "source code" is stored, that would be nice. > > With the new Thusnelda Theora encoder and some luck this could shrink > > further. > > I've no doubt the final Theora 1.1 will give still better results than > 1.1alpha2, and maybe even give somewhat viewable videos at ~200 MB size, but I > have to say it again - the current WRP OGGs are not even of decent quality, not > to mention comparable to the originals. > > If you want to see for yourself, I've uploaded an uncompressed AVI, and both > the WRP version and my new encode of one video to > http://www.filefactory.com/file/ag6g6hb/n/eidos-logo_7z. > > I'm not sure about the English videos right now, I wanted to wait for the final > Thusnelda encoder before reencoding them, but seeing the unsatisfactory quality > of the current files, perhaps we'll replace them sooner. I don't have the bandwidth to look at the video right now, but I'll take your word for it, perhaps someone on the Debian Games team could look for me. ftpmasters: has there been any progress on the data.debian.org archive for huge packages? -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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