** 3 page review / 1867 words **

Pixel Motion

Want to watch movies on your Atari? Here's some advice from 
Shiuming Lai

Several native video/animation formats have evolved from the ST's 
early days as a prominent graphics work-horse for the masses. 
Since then industry developments on more powerful hardware have 
left these in the dark, so where do we stand now? The short and 
sharp answer for most Atari users is, "In the slow lane" - which 
is a lot better than total exclusion! Decent quality video demands 
high colour and resolution, which hikes up bandwidth requirements 
to enormous proportions. Far more than can be economically held on 
most current storage media. The solution is compression, and to 
work effectively this relies on raw host processor power or 
dedicated decoding chips.

With a complete absence of the latter and relatively little of the 
former, it's interesting to see programmers still taking up the 
challenge to squeeze our Ataris for every last drop of 
performance.
Here we have two different video players, both from France. 
Lights, camera, action!

M Player

** MP_STE here
** caption **
This is as much front-end as you'll see in M Player!
** /caption **

** RD11.IMG here **

Guillaume Tello has been developing two versions of his M Player 
for some time, one for ST(e) computers and the other for 68030 or 
above. It's best described as an Imagecopy for video. On the 
player side there is support for major formats like Apple 
QuickTime (and VR extension), Windows AVI, and MPEG, along with 
their bewildering sub variations of colour encoding and 
compression schemes. The popular Atari standards are there too, 
plus extended FLM (which has sound) and the French STraTOS 
magazine's proprietary CDH/L.

The conversion capability is accompanied by simple frame 
sequencing, for those all-important (or irritating!) animated GIFs 
for web pages. Anyone struggling with command line GIF animation 
programs ported from UNIX will be a little more relieved to use 
the batch file utility shell from the same author.

When you create a movie from a pool of frames you can choose to 
add a sound. There is no complex time coding, the playback can be 
set to synchronise with the sound, in which case the sequence's 
frame rate is simply calculated so it lasts the duration of the 
sound, or not.

M Player's presence in an ST guise is very important - few, if 
any, other players on the base TOS machine can match its 
facilities. While the ST can't handle some of the newer formats at 
anywhere near real time, M Player's batch utility can convert them 
down to a format tuned for the ST, like Lexicor's FLM. That 
provokes an immediate comparison with Brainstorm's FLM player, and 
our test shows M Player to be not quite as zippy, even without GEM 
and no dithering.

When playing MPEGs on the Falcon its speed can't match other, 
DSP-driven players, and the output exhibits a little more grain 
near the border of sharply contrasting solid areas. Some bugs in 
the MPEG decoding are apparent too. One of my test files had a 
horizontal resolution 32 pixels wider than the physical screen, 
and instead of being cropped or scaled, the end 32 pixels of each 
scan line appeared at the beginning of every other scan line!

My excitement unsubdued, I tried to play some VCD (Video CD, not 
to be confused with CD Video from about 10 years ago!) discs, 
which are MPEG compressed. No luck. In fairness, none of the other 
MPEG players I tried could manage these either, but Guillaume is 
looking into it. The format is a sort of half-way house between 
Laser Disc and DVD Video, with the benefit that it uses ISO 9660, 
so with the correct decoding algorithm even a basic ST with CD-ROM 
drive could easily read in a film.

There are even some "mutant" films that use interleaved MPEG 1 and 
3 (see boxout) for combined audio and video, M Player extracts the 
video component of these.

The author has aimed to keep the program as compact as possible 
and this is evident in the user interface. It can be slightly 
cryptic at times and gives the impression of being keen to quit, 
if that's a concept you can grasp. It does the job without any 
fuss then as soon as you click "Cancel" in the file selector, 
bang, out of there with ruthless efficiency. Credit is due, 
however, with respect to the machine support. There are three 
graphic output routines, optimised for Nova cards, automatic 
resolution change to Falcon TrueColor, and no graphic card. 
Sound-wise there is DMA for STe/TT and Falcon, or Yamaha PSG or 
Replay/MV16 for STFM, very thoughtful indeed.

It's easy to dismiss M Player on the basis of its looks, a great 
mistake because that minimalist exterior hides some real power. 
There is still plenty of room for refinement though - I would like 
to see more advanced audio embedding, among other things. 
Registering M Player gets you the colour version (the unregistered 
release is greyscale only), and I'd say the fee is quite 
reasonable.


** product boxout **
M Player v2.95

Author
Guillaume Tello
Email: gtello@wanadoo.fr
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gtello/

Status
Shareware

Pros
Powerful, supports many configurations, compact

Cons
Steep learning curve, sluggish MPEG

83%
** /product boxout **

** M Player images and captions **
** ACM.GIF **
M Player is used as a viewer by Homa Systems' driver for SoftKey's 
Infopedia CD
** EBAT.GIF **
String together some picture files easily.


---
Aniplayer

** TDK.TIF here **
** caption **
You can save the current picture in a movie to the clipboard, or a 
series of frames
** /caption **

Didier M‚quignon's Aniplayer is rather more flamboyant - it is a 
generic media player offering a comprehensive interface, in a 
choice of five European languages initialised by a simple and 
elegant installation program. It's also best suited to Falcons, 
STs don't get a look in unless fitted with some later version of 
the 68000 CPU (see Veloce review last issue). The best it can 
manage on an STe is audio playback, and it even attempts large 
files direct from disk albeit with a lot of skipping and jumping.

Aniplayer doesn't cater for as many video formats as M Player, nor 
is it able to convert. However, it does use the Falcon's DSP and 
the MPEG version currently in development reaches 15 frames per 
second with a 160x120 movie on a Speed Resolution card (40MHz 
CPU/DSP, 20MHz bus). In the meantime it uses the DSP where 
appropriate anyway.

No distinction is made between sounds, images or movies in the 
detailed file information box, it gives all possible parameters 
that exist for a given file. The same applies to the slide show 
feature, it'll play whatever is in the directory you choose and I 
found this very useful when compiling audio CDs with another 
program running as an accessory. Aniplayer itself will run this 
way, perfect for breaking up those long periods of work by 
watching some movies!

Choosing a non-GEM display speeds things up and means you can run 
Aniplayer from any video mode and it will automatically switch to 
Falcon TrueColor. Generally this is a good idea, as the dithering 
is somewhat primitive (for maximum speed) and makes images appear 
like being covered with a net curtain. Oddly, viewing JPEGs from 
16-colour mode doesn't switch to a higher colour mode and you get 
that dithering instead. Neither is it very smart with pictures 
larger than the screen, unless you select a GEM display so it can 
come up in a scrollable window.

Video playback performance is fair, it's watchable despite 
"tearing" across the middle amid frame updates - still, less 
apparent than M Player. MagiC fans will be glad to know Aniplayer 
conforms to the ID4-OLGA protocol (see Mark Wherry's article in 
AC#6, page 27), so it can be used as a viewer module in CAB v2.7, 
coming soon now.

A global direct-from-disk option can be toggled. In this mode 
large and colourful movies can cause hiccups in playback, 
especially if they're coming off a slow source (2x CD-ROM, 
perhaps). It works fine for audio, which is played to the nearest 
hardware frequency or resampled on the fly. I don't recommend this 
unless absolutely necessary because it generates audible 
harmonics. Good news is it picks up the 44.1KHz timing signal from 
the Cubase Audio Clock for smooth playback of CD-speed audio, bad 
news is it doesn't have an option to choose either of the 
Steinberg/SoundPool FDI's 44.1KHz or 48KHz clocks.

Overall, a versatile viewer, even though the only supported image 
format is JPEG. There is no shortage of help in the form of ST 
Guide hypertext and those fancy Thomas Much speech bubbles. My 
main concern is the control offered by the transport buttons - in 
video mode the jog shuttle only appears to work forwards, 
otherwise if you want to rewind you have to use the larger 
time-unit based FF/REW. Perhaps it is actually in there, hiding 
among the hundreds of other options! Likewise with audio, the 
controls resemble a standard tape recorder rather than a 
sophisticated digital console.

** product boxout 2 **
Aniplayer v2.02

Author
Didier M‚quignon
Email: didier.mequignon@wanadoo.fr
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/didierm/index-e.htm

Status
Freeware

Pros
Simplicity, speed

Cons
Currently no MPEG, no pro-audio hardware support

88%
** /product boxout 2 **


Summary

Both these programs have something different to offer. In my 
opinion Aniplayer just has the edge owing to the more user-centred 
design. M Player's ability to create and disassemble animations, 
and its wide range of supported formats, makes it a handy tool for 
all TOS machines. If you need these functions, get yourself a 
copy. If you have a Falcon, get Aniplayer anyway, it's good and 
it's free. In common they share command line operation, 
audio/video synchronisation adjustment and exhaustive 
documentation, which includes some programming information. What 
are you waiting for?

** boxout **
MPEG

MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group. It created a format 
designed to minimise the amount of data storage required for video 
by means of Delta compression. In a succession of video frames 
there are likely to be parts of the picture that haven't changed 
from the last, for example, an aeroplane flying across a blue sky. 
The sky will be more or less the same except for the parts where 
there is a moving object, so the video can be encoded in terms of 
changes from the last frame, such as a change of pixel colour at 
co-ordinates (x,y). This is obviously far more efficient than 
storing a completely new frame that contains this one difference. 
"Delta" is the Greek letter used in mathematics to denote a change 
or difference in values, hence Delta compression.

You'll often encounter the words, "B frames" and, "P frames" in 
MPEG. These are the partial (Delta-encoded) frames between each 
key frame (I frame, or Intra frame, coded in their entirety). P 
frames precede each I frame as shown here.

** FRAMES.GIF here

Some players skip partial frames to keep pace with real time and 
this results in a jerkier animation.

The MPEG standard itself has proliferated, there is MPEG 1 and 2 
for video, differing principally in the precision of colour 
encoding, and MPEG 3 for audio.
** /boxout **

** Aniplyer images and captions **
** ANIAUDIO.GIF **
Purist hi-fi
** ANI_INFO.GIF **
** ANI_OPTN.GIF **