Author Topic: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)  (Read 22286 times)

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Offline karajorma

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Cool, thanks a lot for that mjn.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
You bet. Now let's get this merged! :)
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Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Not just yet, I found a few memory leaks :nervous:

 

Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
I think I fixed most of the remaining issues.
I also satisfied a few points of the "License Compliance Checklist" (now there is a notice about FFmpeg usage in the credits and a text file describes how to compile the libraries). Please be aware that the checklist is designed for proprietary applications and not for open-source projects that can't use the GPL version so some of the points on the checklist are not relevant for us.

 

Offline chief1983

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
To the FOSS community I doubt they would consider us legally "open source" due to the volition license so i'd be careful with that.
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Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
What should we be careful about? We may not be a legally open-source project but the source is still freely available and we satisfy as many points of the checklist as possible.

 

Offline Echelon9

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Because of the copyleft nature of the license to software we are considering using.

We need to demonstrate clearly that the combined work is not a derivative of FFmpeg, because the FS2Open project is not in a position to change the license on the Freeespace 2 code we use (only the rights holder can do that). And there are components to the existing Freespace 2 license which are incompatible with a free (as in libre) open source license.

 
Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
As an alternative, you all could use VP8 instead of H.264. The former has the benefit of being freer on a patent basis than H.264 with roughly the same (or slightly larger) file size for the same bitrate. In addition, it has its own self-contained decoder library in libvpx, which is BSD licensed. Also, as it uses Vorbis as the audio stream, it wouldn't mean adding a new audio library. This also opens the door to use VP9 with the same library, which may offer even smaller file sizes still (though I wouldn't recommend it right now; it's still experimental).

 

Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Ugh, vp8 is far inferior to h264 in many ways. vp8 is basically the same quality as theora, so we won't really gain any quality.. just another version of the same quality. The goal here is to get something better.
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Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
The current version already checks the .webm extension which is VP8.

 
Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
vp8 is basically the same quality as theora, so we won't really gain any quality.. just another version of the same quality. The goal here is to get something better.

Not true. Theora was based on VP3, which was 5 iterations before VP8. And it's improved a lot since then. In your remastered cutscenes, Theora has blocks all over the place. VP8 (which you can see from YouTube, or I can post the file someplace) doesn't. And it's an eighth the size, even with more bandwidth allocated to the audio track. So even if it wasn't better than Theora -- which it is -- it is definitely smaller. When I looked at the H.264 YouTube rips, they were twice the size of the VP8 ones for no discernable difference in quality.

I admit, I don't whether you uploaded the original source files for processing or uploaded the Theora videos. So it may not have been an objective test. But if the idea is to look for something better, it behooves the project to look at all of the options (including even H.265 and VP9). Regardless, I will agree that Theora sucks and the sooner we retire it, the better, and it seems like the library is a step in that direction. So yay for that.

 

Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
I realize this is a moot point since m!m's builds can apparently do both. But I have worked in the video production industry for about 7-8 years. Trust me when I tell you that h.264 is objectively better than VP8 in all ways except file size. Especially for our purposes. VP8 is great for web video, streaming things, and stuff you want to get the data of fast at the cost of some (minor) quality. (See: YouTube) However, we don't care about streaming... and the size of the cutscenes is not going to make or break the download size of mods big enough to have cutscenes. For sheer video quality, h.264 is the way to go.
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Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Just to keep everyone updated, I fixed a few issues of the cutscene player on linux and also added a way to use prebuilt LGPL binaries instead of relying on the system libraries which are GPL most of the times.

As far as I know GPL allows to use (and even modify) the libraries if they are not distributed so building a binary for private use may actually not be against the rules of the GPL. That would mean that only the release and nightly builds would need to include the LGPL libraries which would simplify development a lot. If someone knows more about this I would like to know if what I wrote is actually right as I don't know much about all that licencing stuff.

 

Offline z64555

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
As far as I know GPL allows to use (and even modify) the libraries if they are not distributed so building a binary for private use may actually not be against the rules of the GPL.

Yep, section 2 of the GPL states this, that you can use and modify, and allow others to modify, the work under you sole discretion, provided that none of the involved party intends to distribute the "modified work" without appropriate licensing under the GPL. If you have the GPL'd library on your machine already, or otherwise can get it separately, there's nothing legal stating that you can't link the GPL'd library to the program.

The SCP can't distribute such versions of FSO, since that's expressively forbidden by the GPL, but conveying a version of FSO that's linked to an unmodified LGPL'd library is permitted, and of course the source code of FSO is freely available so folks savvy with build systems can use whatever GPL flavor they desire--so long as they don't distribute them.

The safe bet here for us would be to stick with LGPL libraries and leave the custom GPL linking to users that wish to do so, and probably warn them somewhere in bold friendly letters that they cannot distribute/convey copies of their GPL-linked version.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
So... I'm gonna poke this again. I don't understand all the license stuff, but I'm still fed up with Theora. :)
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Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
As far as I can tell this project is ready to be merged but it still needs antipodes and CMake so it might take a while.
Mac support is also an issue because my CMake configuration currently doesn't work there and I don't have a mac so I can test it :sigh:

 

Offline jr2

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
Someone needs to hackintosh.    Maybe your system isn't compatible, but maybe it is!  Then you could possibly test these things (actually, can't you already boot up mac in VirtualBox?

Although all these things take Time:warp:

 

Offline Echelon9

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
There's enough reasonable devs with Macs these days, that we can probably muddle our way through the necessary CMake changes.

 

Offline m!m

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
chief1983 and I had some success on his machine but without direct access to a Mac fixing bugs is very difficult and time consuming.

 

Offline Bryan See

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Re: New cutscene player (more supported formats, better performance)
What about subtitles much like players? What about the .srt file?
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