[Coco] CoCo3 Video Player Version 2 Demo

[John W. Linville]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 12:45:36PM -0700, Steve Batson wrote:
> John,
> 
> this was cool. Is it just a player? Where is the video editing done?

The videos are downloaded from YouTube or ripped from DVDs, etc.
Then, on my PC I use ffmpeg to transcode the videos to the proper
timing parameters (60fps video and 11040HZ 8-bit audio), to extract the
audio to a wav file, and to break the video into a series of PPM files.

I then use ImageMagick to stretch/resize the frames appropriately
and a set of custom tools to convert the PPM format first to a
CoCo3-friendly bitmap format and then to a differential format based
on the difference from each preceding frame. Finally, I evaluate each
segment of the differential format to emit the most important segments
without exceeding the available bandwidth.  I also split the audio wav
file into frame-size samples and interleave them with the video frames.

> It may just be because of the youtube video quality, but I was having 
> difficulty reading some of the text as it flew by. Obviously not something 
> we'd watch movies on, but it cool to see the CoCo doing it.

The resolution is 128x192, slightly better than QVGA but with
rectangular pixels.  Small text reduced from VGA-ish or DVD-ish
resolution doesn't do too well.  The text at the end of the video
seems readable enough. :-)

As for watching movies, I quite enjoyed watching War Games on it
earlier today. :-)  Sure, it's not HD -- more like LD... :)

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.