Making Cinepak files

[doctorclu]

Recently had fun with demo movie files, like the Jaguar commercials.

 

So where can I find the tools to create the movie files?   Any recommendations?

[+Saturn]

Some great resources here and here (problem ended up being the laptop I was using)

May need a few apps that are no longer widely available like Quicktime 7 (known to work for Jag Cinepak vids-higher version # either doesn't work or omits Cinepak completely.) Wish we had a more modern solution to make it easier.

I tried using the cinepak codec in Virtualdub at one point but it didn't work.

 

[+cubanismo]

Yeah, I also tried with the ffmpeg cinepak encoder, didn't work either. It's on my long list of things to look into.

 

Making good Cinepak discs is more of an art than a science, and can easily eat up days of your time. My recent experience: Get Quicktime 7 (I used the windows one). If you scour the web enough you can find the download and a working key without venturing into overly shady websites. Don't download anything that's a 'crack' or 'keygen' with an EXE in it. All you need is a valid key in a text file. Apple doesn't sell them anymore, so I don't feel bad making do like this. The latest quicktime 7 release didn't have cinepak anymore. You need a legit 7.0 or 7.1 or something one, whatever those threads above say. Sometimes if I started with 7.1 and then upgraded to the last release, it kept the cinepak codec around, but sometimes it didn't, and there was no apparent benefit to upgrading.

 

Start out with really high quality content (I.e. 1080p high-bitrate or better ideally), encode it to very high bitrate mpeg4 or something else you can get ancient quicktime to work with using ffmpeg, vlc, virtualdub, etc., then begin the tedious process of manually tuning the bitrate using the workflow well documented above in quicktime. In my experience, there was no quality difference between encoding to the .AVI or .MOV container in Quicktime, contrary to what the guides I found claimed. The options available to you are just different depending on which you work with, so you have to tweak them differently for each. I used .MOV because it gave me more knobs to work with. Make heavy use of the tool in the Jaguar SDK that prints out info about a cinepak file (You'll need dosbox to run it). Regardless of what you choose for the bitrate in Quicktime, it kind of just does what it wants to some degree and has its own ideas about how much leeway it should give to allocating lots of bitrate for some difficult to encode scenes and whatnot. The Atari tool will tell you the actual average bitrate, as well as a "max" bitrate. Generally, you want the average to be as close to 300 as possible without going over 305 or 310. Beyond 300, you're really pushing your luck as the CD unit can only read 300K/s. The max can be pretty high, since the player uses just about all the Jaguar's RAM as a buffer to handle spikes in bitrate, but it really depends on how long it is sustained, which is harder to determine. The verbose mode of the tool will print out the rate for each chunk I believe, but in general, I just try to keep the max below 500 I think (memory is getting rusty here) as a starting point.

 

Once you have something meeting those general guidelines, the only way to really know if it works is to burn it and try. Be sure you have some form of CD bypass cart handy, as you don't want to waste days of waiting for the CD encryption program to maybe work if your JagCD is in a good mood just to run one test cycle. If you don't have a normal bypass cart, I have a hacked up version of the player that runs from a skunkboard, and hence acts as a CD bypass mechanism.

 

Good luck!

[Rick Dangerous]

Add me to the list for The Matrix on Jag CD Cinepak. 

[+cubanismo]

FWIW, I've had a disk of public domain/freely redistributable content almost done (Similar to 'Big Buck Bunny') in the works for a while, but it's been on hold since Clint sent me those Skunk PCBs and I got swamped in that. I'll try to finish it up and post it eventually. I do have one very high-quality completed disk as well, but it's content I can't legally share unfortunately.

 

Things like The Matrix sound cool, but I'm not realistically going to get up and swap disks on the Jaguar CD (Or even the GameDrive for that matter. Maybe if someone ports the cinepak player to read .cpk files directly from the uSD card on the GD to overcome the ~800MB limit...), the current player doesn't support seeking or seamless transitions between tracks (these are all three on my list of things to do "some day"), so I find cartoon shorts (These tend to encode really well) and TV shows currently make the best cinepak content.