Aspect Ratios

Whipped this up quick just for my own reference:

gray = 16:9, full HD = 1920x1080 = 1280x720

black= 4:3 (inside gray), pillarboxing = 1440x1080 = 960x720

red = 16:9 (inside black), windowboxing = 1440x810 = 960x540

blue = 4:3 (inside red), pillarboxed windowboxing = 1080x810 = 720x540

See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht2320

And I actually have seen pillarboxed windowboxing on certain "decimal channels" on TV. What the hell kind of messed up TV would ever need that?

Thoughts on PlayStation TV

PlayStation TV was a good buy for me, but I think I had very specific reasons and conditions:

I wanted to see how PSP games looked and played. WipEout Pulse was as good as ever; just as on the Vita, it ran better than it ever did on the PSP (without dabbling in the dark arts, anyway). Doubled frame rate and practically no loading times.

I wanted to compare the picture quality of PSP games on the PSTV to my actual PSP hooked up to my video scaler (DVDO Edge) with a component cable. PSTV picture quality is still better of course, but now that I know what the "proper" picture looks like, I was able to match the stretching and zooming of the PSP picture to the PSTV picture for a more accurate picture.

I also had a spare 32 GB memory card with more than enough games from my backlog to try, but I didn't want to have to keep swapping memory cards on the Vita, especially with that stupid "rebuilding database" thing that always takes a minute. Putting that spare memory card in the PSTV and putting the compatible games on it was the obvious choice. Now I can easily return to Persona 4 Golden, and I'm playing it in the best possible way. Though I don't think I'll be helping anyone in the dungeons anymore. (Touch screen, remember?)

Finally, there were still plenty of games that I had yet to even download. The PSTV allowed me to download the games, and back them up, without making my actual Vita unusable and making a big deal about it.

Sucks about the even more limited PSP and PS1 compatibility, but since Vita memory cards are still at a premium, you don't want any non-Vita games on your Vita memory card taking up valuable real estate, unless you know you'll be using dual analogs, or you just know the PSP game runs better on the Vita. I know Canabalt is better on the Vita because of the quicker saving after each attempt, and any lag in the Grand Theft Auto games is supposed to be gone, or so I've heard. For everything else, it's best to just use your PSP for PSP games because memory is cheap. I just got my PhotoFast adapter this week, and now that I put in two 64 GB micro SD cards, I realize I should've done the whole PhotoFast setup a long time ago!

Just for reference: NES, cropping, and CRTs

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5208513&cid=47105133

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ra0pg/a_video_showing_the_stunning_difference_scan/

Up next: Thoughts on the PSP! PhotoFast, DVDO Edge scaling, and scanlines.

Thoughts on a Toodles TE Kitty

Long story short: to have the best PS3 stick available, you'll need to get a Mad Catz TE FightStick for the Xbox 360 first.

http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/comment/10137013/#Comment_10137013

http://godlikecontrols.com/

Mysteries of the MP4 solved

Let's start with what we already know:


XviD4PSP 5.xx is the best encoder for everything. I only really use two formats:

• MP4 PS3 or XBOX360
• MP4 PSP AVC

Go to settings and disable auto volume, auto crop, and analyse interlace. Check the global settings and change the temp folder to the same drive you're encoding your video so you're not waking up any sleeping drives when batch encoding.

For most videos (basically any non-PSP video), I like to stick with:

• AVC profile: High
• AVC level: 4.1

I've already written about specific file sizes here, but now that I'm capturing and encoding every episode of Good Eats again at a mere 233 MB, let me just state unequivocally that 3-Pass encoding (versus 2-pass) does make a difference! In fact, the lower the file size and bit rate, the more it matters! I realized that a bit late (already halfway through all the episodes), but what're ya gonna do.



To add chapters to a video, take your newly encoded video and load it into YAMB 1.6 (you probably need to locate MP4Box under Options too). Load a text file that looks like this:

CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=1
CHAPTER02=00:03:16.363
CHAPTER02NAME=2
CHAPTER03=00:07:12.282
CHAPTER03NAME=3
CHAPTER04=00:10:27.010
CHAPTER04NAME=4

You could do this in YAMB 2.1 as well but there's no convenient "clear" button when you're adding chapters to multiple videos, though in the future I might cook up an AutoHotkey script to clear it instantly myself.



To encode the best quality videos for PSP, which is to use XviD4PSP's "MP4 PSP AVC" format at 720x480, follow these settings:

• under video encoding
• Encoding mode: 2-Pass Bitrate
• Bitrate: (kbps) 2000
• AVC profile: Auto (main)
• AVC level: 3.0
• under video > Resolution/Aspect
• Output Resolution: 720x480
• Resize filter: Lanczos4Resize

Then load that newly encoded video in YAMB 2.1 (Warning about uninstalling the 2.1 beta here). Highlight the AVC, go to Properties, then Pixels Aspect Ratio and choose. Without this step, the 720x480 video will not quite be 4:3 or 16:9, and you'll have to stretch within the PSP itself. 

That last one took me about a decade to figure out! I knew Media Go converted videos and kept the original aspect ratio at 720x480, but that program wasn't any good compared to XviD4PSP. With my PhotoFast adapter coming sometime in the future, I'll likely have enough room for every PSP game I've ever bought, all my music, and every Simpsons/Seinfeld/South Park episode!

---

EDIT (2024-05-27): Actually, MeGUI is better...

Weird-ass dream (2014-12-05)

So I was playing a version of Street Fighter where there was also a game of Tetris going on in the background, and the inputs were shared. Move your character left and your Tetromino moves left as well.

Also, a Hatsune Miku RPG not unlike the first Persona game, isometric perspective and all...

(Up next: my thoughts on arcade parts! Probably.)

Cheers to Cooking Channel; jeers to TBS

I've got the urge to capture every single episode of Good Eats again, for the third time.

The first was in the early 2000s with an SD capture card. Back then they didn't have HD anything. The second was when Food Network started airing their programs in HD. And now with Cooking Channel showing Good Eats in HD, I'm inclined to start capturing the hundreds of episodes again, but I can do it right this time. I know about making sure there's no bits of audio after an edited out commercial break. I know how to add chapters to a video file. And the quality is better thanks to my HD capture card.

To Cooking Channel's credit, they aren't showing the old SD episodes with that annoying panorama/stretch-o-vision aspect ratio that Food Network does. Sure, it's stretched, but I can easily shrink it back to 4:3. It's impossible to "un-stretch-o-vision" a picture.

And it's also impossible to uncrop cropped video. TBS apparently doesn't think much of their viewers because they're still showing Seinfeld in "HD" by cropping off the top and bottom of the picture and zooming in. When Funimation released the first Dragon Ball Z DVD sets, they thought they could get away with doing the same thing, but no one liked missing 20% of the picture and eventually Funimation released another DVD set to address the complaints. (And then once more for Dragon Ball Z Kai... and then once more again for the music-fixed DVD release...)

I think I'll try to make my Good Eats encodes a consistent 233 MB, up from the 170 MB my SD encodes were. It'll be down from my usual 440 MB for a 30-minute show without commercials, but I don't think the show requires a high bit rate to begin with, and honestly, there are a lot of episodes. At 233 MB per episode, 18 episodes will fit on a DVD-R. At 440 MB per episode, it would only be 10 episodes per DVD-R.