raphael’s devblog

After quite some requests and some thinking, I finally decided to do a little “mallocs revival” version of PMP Mod. For all who don’t know, malloc was the one that started modding jonnys original PMP Mod and got me started on the subject. He added a very nice resume function, lumi and volume boost (integrated in the official version already) as well as a info overlay during playback (also in official version) and some other small addons.
From there, I added more informational filelist outputs and a GUI and eventually ended with the infamous PMP Mod 1.02M4.02g3 version.

Since then, a lot has changed. Jonny highly improved the playback speed along with many internal changes in the code and also released the now famous PMP Mod AVC. However, these versions all lacked some of the nice features from the old version, but now they are back (apart from the GUI ;P).

Here’s what’s new:
- fixed rightmost cutting bug with newest FontGen 0.4+ fonts
- fixed clipping bug in glyph blitter
- fixed crash bug when trying to play non-avc videos
- fixed uppercase bug in filelist
- fixed non-showing subtitles bug when playing a short part twice in a row
- added file sorting, subtitles and files are ordered by filename now, rather than creation time
- added USB connection in filelist
- added filesize/modification time display in filelist
- added video information display (resolution, codec, fps, duration)
- added resume function (start with O to skip resume)
- added saving and loading of playback settings (audio stream, aspect, zoom, lumi/volume boost, subtitle/color)
- added display of number of found subtitles
- added file deletion function (SELECT)
- changed sensitivity of buttons in filelist, fast scrolling only after pressing button 1/3 second

These additions are also about to be added to the standard version PMP Mod 2.02, however, there were some problems which have to be fixed first. So stay tuned.

Along with this release comes yet another version of FontGen, which adds back all Windows codepages from 1250-1258. This was neccessary, because some of the ISO8859 fonts weren’t compatible with subtitles generated in windows and led to wrong output of the subtitles (cyrillic for example).

All downloads are available in the download section. Enjoy!

I updated my FontGenerator tool to version 0.5, which brings the following features:

- fixed a crash with asian fonts from preliminary version 0.4
- added support for GB-18030 charset, covering trad. and simp. chinese
- added support for loading custom charsets from .ucm files

You can get a number of such files from here:
http://dev.icu-project.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/charset/data/ucm/

Fonts generated from UCM files (like all default asian languages) will default your subtitle input method to UTF-8, so either convert your subtitles to UTF-8 format or change input method during playback with CROSS+SELECT.
I also updated all asian font files with the new tool, so redownload if you want to try

I created a sourceforge account some days ago and finally managed to import the current versions of PMP Mod AVC 1.02b and PMP Mod 2.02b into SVN. Branches for new versions as well as the GUI version will be created in the near future.

I hope that probably somewhere in the future jonny joins the sourceforge project and commits his changes there, so that the versions are more centralized, though at the moment it would probably be unneccessary, since the differences between his original version and my subtitle mod are more or less subtle, so it’s still very easy to merge my code to new versions from jonny. I doubt though that this will still be as easy for the GUI version, so I hope when it will be finished to get jonny to join the sourceforge project. But we’ll see

Sourceforge Project Page:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pmpmod/

SVN Repository:
http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.cgi/pmpmod/

Here is the PMP Mod AVC version with all the benefits from previous release. CPU speed change, colored subtitles, SubRip support, everything.
Additionally, I fixed a bug in the old release, which did not clear the black bars on 4:3 or widescreen stretch aspect ratios correctly, leading to overdrawing subtitles.

Apart from that, I also completely rewrote the font border rendering in the FontGenerator tool, yielding much better quality and also adds support for arbitrary sized borders. To do that, use the FontGenerator tool as before, but specify the border and blur factors in the edit fields. A border size of 1.5 and a blur factor of 0.3 seems to give overall good results. You can use a border size of 1.0 and blur 0 to get close to the old style. Border sizes above 2.0 and blur factors over 1.5 are generally not recommended, as these will probably lead to clipped and displaced characters.

Here is a screenshot of the new colored fonts, also showing japanese output:

There are quite some updates coming with PMP Mod v2.02 subtitle mod:
- based on jonnys 2.02 source with all improvements
- support for SubRip (.srt) subtitles
- asian language subtitles supported (japanese,korean,trad. chinese) [not highly tested, due to my lack of knowledge of these languages - please let me know if there are problems]
- support for up to 8 different subtitles per video (switch them during playback with CROSS+LEFT TRIGGER)
- change subtitle font and border color with CROSS+SQUARE and CROSS+CIRCLE
- file list is filtered to *.pmp files
- change CPU speed before playback (RIGHT TRIGGER in file list)
- ISO8859 fonts included in the release

These additions will soon be integrated into the AVC version too. Please be patient.
Also note, that since we now have a working downgrader for 2.6, I don’t provide any further updates on the 2.0+ version, unless I get enough feedback that it is still wanted. Version 2.01 for 2.0+ will still be available though.

TODO:
- more accurate character placement (at least it looks really bad on asian languages)

Well, not in this case really. For the last few weeks, I was pretty much held off from coding so there wasn’t much happening. First the worldcup took my time, then my girl and now I’m caught in some logjam. I just can’t get to start anything done. Well, I hope this blockade will soon disappear.

Only thing I got to do, was starting to work on a dynamic texture manager. It’s not yet completely finished, though the basic code is done (it keeps textures in VRAM on a most frequently used [MFU] base and supports priority levels). I’m not 100% confident in the implementation though, because I start to believe it would be better to simply upload every texture on usage and only use a FILO system for memory management. Well, I’ll need to get some benching numbers first to make further assumptions.

You\’re lost in the PMP Mod wild? You don\’t know how you should encode your videos to .pmp format? Then this is the right place to look. Kyle M. from qj.net put together this really easy to follow guide on PMP Mod usage. Thanks!
http://pspupdates.qj.net/QJ-Guide-The-PMP-Movie-format/pg/49/aid/56964

I finally managed to get away from my GUI coding and integrate my subtitle mod into jonnys latest PMP Mod AVC version. So here it is for you all to enjoy full support for MicroDVD subtitles with AVC

Along with this I also have a new set of fonts available for download, that cover the whole region of ISO8859 charsets. So if you do not find a matching font in the release or just don’t know which one fits your needs, try with these fonts.

Here’s a listing of the fonts and their coverage:

For more information read on wikipedia.

I hope this covers all non-asian languages properly, though untested Support for asian fonts is already in the go.

I tuned my valloc routines today, such that vlargestblock now now returns a static value which is recalculated with every call to valloc/vrealloc/vfree and in the last case with some speed improvement. This is useful when you need to free up VRAM space until a specific size block is available, like in my dynamic glyph cache.

For everyone that doesn’t know yet:
The valloc tool provides the functions valloc, vrealloc and vfree, which allow dynamic allocation of the VRAM on Sony PSP.
There are also informational functions vmemavail and vlargestblock to get the remaining free space in VRAM.

The sources are available in the download section.

Regarding my PMP Mod project, I got to finish the dynamic glyph cache allocation for the font rendering system yesterday. This was needed to be able to have more glyph caches for the GUI, where a lot of text will be placed on the screen. Along with this, I also improved the time to find a cache-hit, by better ordering of the linked list and also started to add support for font files with italic and bold styles, so that formatted text is now possible with subtitles and inside the GUI. Old font files will still be supported though, and its also possible to only include one style.

I also played around a little bit with GU blending functions for image tinting, which I plan on supporting for the OSD and maybe also for the whole GUI. I’m not confident yet though whether to use the GU for real-time effects, which may not be 100% perfect or simply doing software preprocessing on the GUI images.

PS: jonny released an updated version of PMP Mod AVC yesterday with zoom functionality and changed keymapping. I’ll do a subtitle mod version tomorrow.

PMP Mod (and my small subtitle mod to it) made 8th place of the QJ.net Top 10 Summer Homebrews.

That’s quite good, regarding SNES9x TYL together with DGEN took 1st place. Other competitors were such great homebrews as Beats of Rage, DevHook, PSP Quake or PSPRadio. I think PMP Mod could have placed better, since there’s so much potential, like the straming feature of DickyDicks Pimpstreamer version.

I’m working hard on getting PMP Mod to a point were it will at least be placed under the top 5 homebrews. It’s possible