Cutscene upscaling by themac

[themac]

Hey all

Tonight I made some experiments with upscaling the intro video. The original footage is quite blurry but I did my best to keep some details, add some sharpness, remove compression artifacts and finally convert it from 25 fps to 60 fps via Smooth Video Project. The video itself has been processes twice via GigaPixel AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz6TJkVwLdE

Greetings, themac

[montetank]

Yes-it looks waaaaayyy better and is smooth.

[themac]

Great. Feel free to use it if you like it. Here is the new video file for download >google drive<

[Tzeentch]

YT video unavailable.... would like to see a comparison. Your link has a 404 for the G drive as well.
If this looks great, and possibly smaller file size then why not replace all the cutscenes with your version?
I found online a LQ and HQ and the file size is vastly different -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/warzon ... 00/Videos/

Low = 169.6 MB
High = 964.3 MB

Infact... using ffmpeg under the hood I reckon I can do a better job of this, and since then we have h.265 encoding we can use.

[pastdue]

Infact... using ffmpeg under the hood I reckon I can do a better job of this, and since then we have h.265 encoding we can use.

Due to licensing requirements, we likely cannot use non-royalty-free / patent-encumbered codecs like H.265 / HEVC.

[Tzeentch]

Oh yes my mistake, but x265 is a winner - "x265 is a free software library and application for encoding video streams into the H.265/MPEG-H HEVC compression format, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL."

I'd like to give it a go, where can I find the original videos to play with? The main links to each of HQ, LQ and Standard contain a single .wz file which only looks to play one video natively after I rename to .avi

Also note when you look on the DL by week that you can see HQ is DL vastly more often than anything else.

"you need to compile rpl2avi, convert the original RPL files into the AVI format, then encode those to Ogg/Theora/Vorbis. Music is also in Ogg/Vorbis format."- from the FAQ. Perhaps including the original RPL files in source as a thought? As I don't see where those RPL files are or exist. Or even better the pure output from the rpl2avi command so I have the .avi(s) to work with directly.

[themac]

I made an upscale attempt again. Here it is. Edit: file no longer available.

[pastdue]

Oh yes my mistake, but x265 is a winner - "x265 is a free software library and application for encoding video streams into the H.265/MPEG-H HEVC compression format, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL."

The library may be open source, but the issue is the patents and licensing that cover playing content encoded in H.265. The actual video format is the problem, unfortunately.

[Tzeentch]

Ok so what you are trying to inform me is that WZ can only play sequences.wz if it is done a specific way? How does the game playback the videos currently? Is that what libsequence.so is used for?
Can we/I find an alternative drop in replacement to allow native playback of H.265? I'm sure something must exist.
"The videos are encoded from the uncompressed AVI files via ffmpeg2theora, using libtheora 1.1 beta1. The command used was: ffmpeg2theora --optimize -v10 -K65536 --pp de/tn:64:128:256 -c2" - this was how HQ has been done and 900MB+ seems very large for what it is.

[themac]

.wz files are .zip files. you can just rename the file extension.

[pastdue]

Ok so what you are trying to inform me is that WZ can only play sequences.wz if it is done a specific way? How does the game playback the videos currently? Is that what libsequence.so is used for?
Can we/I find an alternative drop in replacement to allow native playback of H.265? I'm sure something must exist.

What I'm trying to say is WZ supports a video codec that has both (a) an open-source library for decoding and (b) is not patent-encumbered.

It does not matter what library you find for H.265 - H.265 itself is patent-encumbered. We can't use H.265 at this point in time, regardless of the decoding library.

[Tzeentch]

Aha understood now I get where the issue lies. Ok I'll drop the idea of using H.265. I have another solution for you! AV1

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1

Thanks @themac, actually that is really obvious just renaming the file extension from .wz -> .zip then extracting...

I have taken the largest video "devastation" and I have found 2 important points just on bitrate.

* data bitrate overkill. Set at 2468 kbps, this can be better handled and dropped much lower.
* audio bitrate too high. Set at 499 kbps, for Stereo channel 128 bit is the highest required.

I did a quick test just dropping those values slightly and was able to reduce the file by 50% and both visuals and audio are completely fine. ( without changing anything else ) I can do all files, upload somewhere and you could even hand inspect them to be happy before replacing what is provided.

[themac]

Here you find my attempt to upscale the devestation movie. Edit: file no longer available.

[Tzeentch]

I have noticed another issue with all videos provided ( LQ and HQ ) . All videos have the left side partially cropped off. You can see this in the recent semi-walkthrough vs orig PS1 clips, as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OLqRfxQ_nM&t=360s. Best to start with the originals and work from there to upscale etc. I will get this all sorted out when time permits me. - Can anyone provide me with the PS1/Orig videos or point me to them?

https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100/issues/1809 - for me.

[Tzeentch]

Working on this in another thread. Questions have been answered there.
Sorry @themac for taking over your topic
Still may need assitance with upscaling once I am finished with the orginals ( as you'll need better source material to upscale from )