Playstation Video player
 

Recently, I've started to tinker with my playstation. I've modded it, tried nifty online homebrew apps, etc., but now I'm trying to find a software video or VCD player for PS1, having a portable VCD player would be nifty. Is is possible to encode videos in the PS FMV format onto CDs with an included player easily available online; a CD image able to be augmented with videos. If anyone knows about something like this, please post it here.

*note* I didn't know whether I should've posted this here or gaming, but I think this board is a bit more suitable...

simple answer, you can't not without addon hardware like the gamars VCD player, or convert them to a STR file

PSX isn't powerful enough to decode VCD without a hardware addon.

charliex hit it on the head - the PSX is only a 33 Mhz machine - not near powerful enough to decode mpeg video without a hardware addon. There is, however, one for the Dreamcast.

Very wrong on that last point - Sony did do a version of the playstation that could play VCDs, as far as I know it was a software solution. Not many made, either.

And the CPU on the playstation wouldn't be doing the decoding, most of that job would be done by the GPU, which works a lot faster.

disregarding VCD, is there a way to format video files to whatever is used by PS games? charliex, you mentioned converting them to STR files...would you explain this?

clonmult, Oh you mean the SCPH 5903, not very wrong at all the version of the sony PSX that was designed to play VCDs had an upgrade. why do you think they made a new version of it rather than sell software to be able to do it... it had a lot of extra features in it as well to protect against the rampant piracy in Asia

the MDEC decoding of the str files is a bit like mpeg-1 but its in the hardware, this is what they've changed for the 5903.

MPEG-1 decoding requires a lot of math and a lot of data moving so high bus usage, its possible to do it in fixed point since the PSX doesn't support floating point you'd have too, and thats all done on the CPU not the GPU, you cant hand off an MPEG1 data stream to the GPU... it has to be processed by the very slow CPU and while the CPU is working it gets access to the bus, which kills the speed of the GPU, so even if you could transfer the raw data via the GPU to the screen the decoding for the CPU would kill the frame rate.

The STR format was optimized for the PSX's hardware so it could stream it off quickly with little help from the CPU, even with that it still stutters, though thats more to do with the cheap CD mechs

You need movtools to create a STR file, it converts an AVI to a STR then you burn that as an ISO. Unfortunately movtools is an official sony developer product, so it'd be warez and against the TFP rules, on top of that as a registered PSX/PS2 sony developer i'd get in trouble :)


Aas for playing native VCDS no matter what clonmult says you can't do it, the modified RS3000 in the PSX just isn't upto it, there would be a handful of players if it could, theres one official one, the 5903 and one unofficial one the Gamars, both of them are hardware solutions.