Ripping Games for better USB-Performance

[NoNr]

Hi,
as I unfortunatly have an PSTwo v14 with no ability to add a real IDE-HDD I try to get the most out of OPL (SVN from 30th of July 2011) and USBAdvance.

As OPL has very good compatibility now and most games that wont run on it will start via USBAdvance, the greatest problem on using USB is still the low datarate thats causing stuttering and freezes on FMV-scenes.
To bypass this bottleneck there came the idea of just reducing the bitrate of the movie-files to my mind.

Greatest Question, is there an overview of allowed bitrates and resolution/fps combinations for .pss files and other ps2 video formats? (I already recognized that compressing audio is not liked by all games...).

Thx forward and regards ex
nono

edit:
Just recognized on "R-Type Final [SLUS_207.80]" that even a downsize from 228MB to 73MB did no markable afford on smoothing the playback of the intro-movie. Is even an overall bitrate of 5552Kbps too much load for the PS2-USB-Port or did i made a mistake? Used PSSDown to reduce video quality to 30% and resampled the audio from 48KHz Stereo to 22KHz Mono.

[Player1]

You can also eliminate that videos, remaining the game perfectly playable using USBUTIL.

About reducing bitrate, im not familiarized whit that, but it sound good.
I remember years ago i had some programs to do that, but i lose interest and never did it.

Im totally off today, if you have some ideas, i ll be happy to try it.

[NoNr]

Ripping the movies apart is not an option For some games they are just too important (rpg's, adventures and so on...).

I recognized that pssdown and pssplex didn't corrected the video-bitrate of the downsampled files correctly so I tried the use of ps2strw and tmpgenc to reencode the video files to a new overall datarate of 3352kpbs (former 15000kpbs video + ~1500kpbs audio). But that didn't changed anything either.

Now I recognized that, if I play ps2strw's demuxed .ads audio in Goldwave it sounds nearly the same as on my tv. I will give it a try and change just this file instead of the waves created by pssplex that i used before...

update: that didn't did the trick, same result as always

update 2: It even seems not to be the usb-ports fault, i tried a file with 1352kbps (usb1.1 transfer rate is about 1500kpbs) and even that didnt even brought a slighty better performance. Seems to be a general problem on how usb-loaders shiver the data to the memory or so...

Btw.: The video stuttering appears with USBAdvance and PS2ESDL 0.821 (OPL is not able to run the game at all).

[NoNr]

Solved: Downsampling the videostream only + PS2ESDL's 32bit-Caching-Feature have done the job. Audio downsampling seems not to possible with this game at all

Anyway I don't like this method because it's not an all-tool's solution and PS2ESDL is acting like a pussy when games on HDD are being fragmented^^

[SP193]

update 2: It even seems not to be the usb-ports fault, i tried a file with 1352kbps (usb1.1 transfer rate is about 1500kpbs) and even that didnt even brought a slighty better performance. Seems to be a general problem on how usb-loaders shiver the data to the memory or so...

The problem probably lies in a few areas:

1. The PS2's extremely insufficient 36MHz I/O Processor (IOP).
2. The game is badly written (As in it's inefficient, not well designed to maximize data transfer rates - so playback will be fine with CD/DVD and not with anything slower).

Some games read data a little at a time, or read data and expect the data to be read in almost instantly like FFXII does (Even a little delay/slowdown will mean stuttering).

Remember: The USB 1.1 interface has a bandwidth of 1500KB/s - not throughput.

Sending many commands to the USB device (Like when many small read commands are issued instead of a few large requests) will mean lower efficiency.

Anyway I don't like this method because it's not an all-tool's solution and PS2ESDL is acting like a pussy when games on HDD are being fragmented^^

Well, sometimes you don't really have a choice.

The reason why no moden USB-device loader (PS2ESDL and OPL) allows the usage of fragmented files is because the IOP of the PS2 only has 2MB RAM (too little for a large data cache) and USB 1.1 is too slow.

By assuming that the files (disc images) are contigous, there will be no overhead imposed since there is no need to read cluster data.

[TnA]

All USB-Loaders use the IOP (Co-Processor) to move data from USB to RAM.
This causes (alot) CPU-Cycles/Ticks to be used, only to move data around (no DMA).

PS2ESDL does some stuff, which isn't data-transfer-related on EE (Main-Processor in PS2-Mode), instead of how most loaders do it,... on the IOP.
Now if enough IOP-RAM is free, the sector-caching-feature might have some influence on atleast a few games.


Btw.:
OPL is a 'pussy' too, when it comes to fragentation on USB.


Argh,... SP193 was faster.


Additionally to what he said:

The InGame-Driver is also smaller, when it doesn't need support for filesystems.
The InGame-CDVD-Replacement-Driver must be as small as possible, or atleast not bigger than the one of the game which is about to be started...
Well,... Maybe not in all cases.
There might be enough games, which are still compatible.

[NoNr]

Haha never cared for fragmentation before I tried PS2ESDL, and after you mentioned it, I defragmented my HDD and voilla R-Type runs with OPL too, not better or worse than on the other loaders but at least it runs^^ Thx TnA

[Player1]

All tose games you prefer running good, jst put them at the beginning of usb stick/disc, so the acsess is a bit faster.

And put them one by one.

[NoNr]

Nah its not just the "where it is" the "how its been accessed" is very important too. And PS2ESDL with his small size does here the trick with its bigger buffers^^