raphael’s devblog

Q: What subtitle formats are supported?
A: Currently only MicroDVD and SubRip format is supported, more will probably follow.

Q: How much do subtitles affect performance of PMPMOD?
A: In a series of benchmarks with jonnys own benchmark code, it showed that subtitles will decrease the average fps by 0.3 at most.

Q: That’s cool, but how do you do that?
A: Just some organized glyph caching in VRAM and my own fast glyph blitter.

Q: How do I change the codepage/charset/language?
A: Inside the PMPMOD folder are different font files for different languages. To change the language, simply rename the ‘font10.f’ to ‘font10_orig.f’ or alike and rename the font you want to use to ‘font10.f’.
If you want to display hebrew subtitles for example, rename ‘font10_iso8859_8.f’ to ‘font10.f’.
For information which of the ISO fonts best suits your needs, take a look at wikipedia.

Q: Why so complicated?
A: Because it’s simpler for me and because most users most likely only need to do this step once, so this shouldn’t be a problem. A possibility to choose language in the program will follow later.

Q: What about other languages?
A: Each font file holds a charset of one or more Unicode pages, ie 256 chars. The file is generated from Windows fonts using a small tool. So if you have a font installed with your charset, you can create your own font file. Currently, the font generator tool will create fonts for charsets of the whole ISO8859 range, as well as ShiftJIS, UniHan and BIG5.

Q: How do I get asian subtitles to show?
A: Download the font you need (ShiftJIS for japanese, UniHan for korean, BIG5 for trad. chinese), and rename it to ‘font10.f’ and copy it to the pmpmod folder on your psp. Make sure your subtitle file is saved in UTF-8 (good text editors support options to change encoding, like Notepad2) and copy it to your PSP/VIDEO folder, naming it like the video, ie for a “my_nice_video.pmp” you’d need to have anything like “my_nice_video*.srt” or “my_nice_video*.sub” in the folder. Start PMP Mod and enjoy!

Q: Asian subtitles won’t show correctly but only something like “a[]äj*”, what’s wrong?
A: You tried to use a western font, which forces the subtitle to be read in ASCII mode and create such results. Read above for step by step instructions.

Q: What’s the difference between FW2.0+ and FW1.5 versions?
A: The speed. The FW2.0+ version cannot use the ME to do the heavy idct needed by the decoder, and even though some vfpu optimizations have been applied it stands in no competition against the ME version. I found the average speed drop to be around 8-9fps, yet it is enough to playback high quality anime episodes smoothly. It should also be possible to playback 768kbit encodings minimum smoothly, however I didn’t benchmark that.

Q: Does this also work on 2.0 with tiff exploit?
A: PMP Mod 2.01 works on Firmwares 2.0+, yes. Thanks to tommydanger this now also works with the tiff exploit. The development of the 2.0+ Firmware version is currently stopped however, since there is a downgrader to 1.5 available and with DevHook, there’s really no need to stay at anything from 2.0 – 2.6.

Q: Arrrrgggg…. where is the (nice) GUI?!
A: Lost in space. No. It’s not included because it will get completely rewritten from scratch with better skinning support, a option screen and nice graphics and fonts.

Q: When will it be done?
A: When it’s done.