How can I convert video files into a format that the DM355's Mpeg4 decoder can handle? I have seen two related references in the TI web collateral,
(1) The first was an in-depth discussion of how to do it using various open source tools, but I can not find the document again. It was somewhere on the TI website or Davinci/Linux mailing list, but the search tools will not find it. Can someone point me to this URL or app note.
(2) The second was a reference in theTI wiki about a TI eval version of Arcsoft media converter that will convert audio video files into a format that is compatible with the DM355's restricted Mpeg4 decoder.
( http://wiki.davincidsp.com/index.php?title=DM3xx_Gstreamer_Solution)
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"DM355 can only playback movie clips encoded by DM355 MPEG4 encoder, or transcoded by certain tools.
MediaConverter from ArcSoft is able to convert most of movies to DM355 playable video format. The TI eval version of MediaConverter will converter the audio channel to u-law format. Then mencoder could be used to convert the audio channel to mp3 format."
The TI DM355 is obviously not on the Arcsoft's drop-down list of supported devices. Can you clarify what version of MediaConverter is being referred to and where it can be obtained?
Thanks ... gary
I am trying to get some more information internally, but since this is an ArcSoft tool, I would recommend you also try to contact them and see what they say about DM355 support.
ok, so I got confirmation from a person that has used this before. He claims to be using trial version 2.5 of the MediaConverter tool.
It may be a little deep, but since I am not that familiar with the Arcsoft tool I can at least suggest what settings you would need to have in the MPEG4 to have it be decodable by the DM355. If you look in your DVSDK install in something like dvsdk_1_30_00_40\dm355_codecs_1_12_000\packages\ti\sdo\codecs\mpeg4dec\dm355\docs you should find release notes for the MPEG4 decoder. These release notes list the limitations of the MPEG4 decoder, and should give you an idea what you need to transcode the stream into to have it playable by the DM355. For example it does not support video packet resynchronization, data partitioning, reversible VLCs, or header extention code. You would need to set up the encoder to not utilize these sorts of MPEG4 features to make the stream compatible with the DM355 decoder (I am assuming the Arcsoft tool has these sorts of settings). There are additional limitations on the size of the stream and such that are also listed in that document, these are not planned to be changed for future codec software releases.
Additional information along the lines of what Bernie described can also be found in the link below
http://wiki.davincidsp.com/index.php?title=DM355_Codecs
Thanks, I have an email question into Arcsoft.
I remember seeing a much more detailed step-by-step instruction application note somewhere in the TI support collateral that called out specific open source tools to do this as well. I remember looking at it, but I did not download or bookmark it. Has anyone seen this document?
Is there a company or resource that you re aware of that could convert a supplied sample media clip (other than the supplied Davinci effect) for a proof-of-concept demo?
I seem to recall a wiki article (not DM355 specific), but other than that, no other collateral comes to mind. Is the collateral you are referring to DM355 specific? For DM355, the only tool to convert a video stream to a format compatible with DM355 MPEG4 decoder is the ArcSoft tool mentioned in your post.
If Arcsoft does not work one one clunky way of doing this would be to play the file on some player that can play it (PC or hand held player) and feed the output of that into the DM355 to have the DM355 encode it (the out of the box demo and a composite input could do this easily), though this would potentially mean a loss in quality in the coversion to analog composite video and back again.
A similar potential method would be to have some PC based software decode all the frames into a raw uncompressed format and than feed that into the DM355 to encode, though I am not sure what PC software would do this and how much you would have to modify the demo code to make it work.
Yep, SOMEWHERE, I saw a DM355 specific "how-to" instructions on this. It was not on my "to-do" list at the time and I did not look at the details. I have tripped over it more than once, but can not find it this morning.
I imgine that it might take Arcsoft some time to get back with me and then I will have to get past the end-consumer support level to find who has knowledge of the "TI-Eval" version. If you have a contact there that could circumvent all the questions, it would be appreciated. The process may surprise me, I will let you know.
Good idea about using the video encoder, if the quality loss is not extreme. I will give it a shot this afternoon.
Unfortunately, I do not have an ArcSoft contact; hopefully, you are successful implementing Bernie's idea. If you run into problems, please feel free to post questions and we will do our best to assist you.
I would like to see the how to instructions myself, I would not be suprised if this was done somewhere before, but I have never seen them. You are not the first person to ask how to make a file playable by the DM355, and will probably not be the last so hopefully someone somewhere has these how to steps (if so it will probably make a good wiki.davinicdsp.com article).
I agree, if you ever do run into this collateral again, please post it here. I have been working with this platform since it came out and do not recall such collateral, but would definitely be interested in seeing it.
I found what I was thinking about. Unfortunately it about creating elementary streams for the DM6446, not the DM355:
http://wiki.davincidsp.com/index.php?title=Encoding_and_decoding_DVEVM_clips
I did recall this one, but as I suspected, it was not DM355 specific. It appears that MediaConverter is the way to go (proven solution), unluess you want to encode the video stream using DM355 as Bernie suggested (probably easier).
I may have some good news; we might be able to provide you the proper MediaConverter tool directly so long as we collect some minor information (e.g. company name, contact info) as required per ArcSoft. We are ironing out a simple process to do this, so please stay tuned...
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