Replacing STRs

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I'm trying to replace Parasite Eve intro movie with a wallpaper I made in PS. Saved it as 320 x 240 bmp 24bits and converted it to a 1s movie. After that I went in movie converter and converted the AVI I made to a no audio STR file.

The problem is that if I replaced the intro movie of PE with the one I made the game crashes, it boots but then it crashes with a black screen when it loads the intro movie.

To replaced the str I used PSXLDR.

However, if I replaced the intro movie with the blank.str that comes with PSXLDR, the game doesn't crash. It shows the blank.str movie and then goes the the start screen just fine.

What's different from the movie I made to the blank.str that comes with PSXLDR?
 
Large Data Ripper, found it in a PSX emulator for Pocket PC community.

Tried changing many encoding options at wild, like speed and fps, in some cases PE crashes but also plays some looping noise, as if it was repetedly trying to play that movie.
 
Psmplay is unable to play my own made STR, seems that something is going wrong in the encoding process.

I used jpsxdec to analyze the blank.str and found  that it contains two STR and eight XA, also, psmplay plays it fine.
 
STR's are not normal sectors is part of the problem they use Mode2 operation and the audio uses the full 2352 byte sector where as video only uses the first 2048 ignoring the remaining 256 bytes (ECC data for CD audio). The format has 2 channels of audio, IF the sectors are not interleaved correctly and you have set the file for audio it will not work correctly.  You should check what the original video format was and see if the black movie you replaced it with has a zero audio sector in it.  You may need a no sound audio sector :)

Cyb
 
Has movie converter ever been documented?

I'm trying to merge my STR with the blank.xa with all kinds of switches combinations with no success, every generated STR that I pass trough jpsxdec outputs an error "no audio stream found".

PS: It seems that movie converter crashes everytime you select normal speed and not double speed. Also, is this tool broken??? It seems that any outputed XA file contains no audio at all, no matter what switches you use.

+ Uhm. Made a 5s random noise wav and it converted just fine to XA. jpsxdec found the XA stream in it. Maybe movie converter auto ignore audio if it's completely mute?

+ Uhm. Now the STR plays in Psmplay, however it doesn't play in game and causes jpsxdec to output many errors about framerate detection.

+Weird. Don't remember what I did to make the XA readable by jpsxdec, now I lost that. Both the AVI converted to str + audio and the XA alone play fine in psmplay, however if I make STR no audio and then try to mux it with the XA I can't do it due to sector size errors.

+Even more weird. If I make the random noise wav mono and 18.9hz but convert it to XA setting it for stereo and 37.8hz it opens in psmplay, but if I set it to XA 18.9hz and mono psmplay outputs an error when trying to open it "sector not found".

+After countless trial and errors I gave up trying to replace files directly within the iso. I'm going for a different approach now, extracing all files with ISO buster and then reconstructing the ISO with mode 2 cd maker. I was able to make a working ISO  (at least in epsxe) with that approach, but surprisingly my STR didn't play at all, the game just skipped it and played another movie in its place.
 
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After almost dying for it............. IT WORKED!

1-BMP to AVI (A black 320 x 240 background with the word RIPPED in white)
2-AVI to STR no sound (MDEC 3! MDEC2 in PE1 wasn't working. Left default 1 channel and 15fps)

Now the trick that made it work

3-Dissamble the ISO with ISO Buster (Got corrupted sector errors, ignored all)
4-Reassembled the ISO with Mode 2 CD Maker (filesize shrunk about 100mb for some reason compared to original iso)
5-Tested in Epsx, game boots and goes in game
6-Replace FMVs 000 and 001 with a copy of that home made STR
7-Reassemble the ISO with Mode 2 CD Maker (
8-Test in Epsxe
9-In place of the squaresoft logo + PE1 regular intro I saw a black background with the word RIPPED in white.
10-Fun
 
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jPSXdec is hopefully the most forgiving of all Playstation 1 media decoders (at least, that's how I tried to write it). I am surprised and saddened that it is failing to properly decode some of the videos thrown at it. It will be awhile before I can find whatever the problem is and fix it.

Encoding fresh video for Playstation is a very tricky task, then properly replacing that video in the CD image brings its own batch of tricks and issues. I'm rather surprised anyone is ever to pull it off. There are lots of little details that must be just right, otherwise all you're gonna get is errors.

If you really want to figure out what's wrong (and I mean really), you can read the massive, highly technical text file detailing the Playstation movie formats. I don't know what to tell you beyond that.  :|


Now only thing I'm curious about is why you chose PSmplay to extract the wav instead of jPSXdec when you were already using jPSXdec to convert to AVI.
 
Try extracting all files first for later rebuilding the iso.

I still don't understand how can movie converter generate a XA stream that is playable by psmplay but unreadable by jpsxdec.
 
You're right  : ) but there is no difference between PSmplay and jPSXdec in decoding of wave-files
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Ah, ok. I was just curious if there was something wrong with jpsxdec that led to that choice. From the comparisons I made of wav decoding, it seemed like jpsxdec was getting slightly better results than the other leading decoders (though I'm sure no one would notice).

I still don't understand how can movie converter generate a XA stream that is playable by psmplay but unreadable by jpsxdec.
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I think I know why jpsxdec doesn't like it. If I'm right, your audio is probably fine. jpsxdec generally expects sectors of 2048 or 2352, unless it's video, then it might also try 2336. Unfortunately it doesn't currently check if it's 2336 sectors with only audio.
 
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I came across games that can't be ripped, not without manually editing bytes.

Found a company called Watto Studios that makes a software called Game Extractor, targered at ppl who wish to play around with game data files.

But unfortunately I could'nt do anything about reinserting videos in Syphon Filter 2. First because all movies are inside some 400MB+ HOG file. Second because that HOG file can't be extracted by ISO Buster due to corrupted sectors.
 
Hm. I successfully deleted a STR and then inserted a new one with ultraiso. However the processed ISO is no longer readable by jpsxdec, jpsxdec can no longer detect any media files, yet it still runs in epsxe.

Oh, almost forgot. This last case was a CCD / IMG iso.
 
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the processed [CCD / IMG] is no longer readable by jpsxdec
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An open source, volunteer based project reading an obscure, proprietary, undocumented file format? Surely you jest.  :roll:
 
Converted the CCD / IMG to BIN / CUE, then I replaced the DreamFactory logo movie with a still image, retaining the original 30fps and 2 channels. Now the game loaded and played the dreamfactory movie, but it seems that the movie looped about 3 times before finally skipping and going in game.

... Still image = 1 second movie
 
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