Topic: two questions for people who know their stuff, and a third for anyone

[joeamis]

1. How much dvd quality film (in scale of time) ex: hrs,mins. can be fit on 1 gamecube disc?

2. What's the added increase risk of emulation of current and future systems, with the companies themselves running emulation on their system and hiring outside programmers to do this for them? ex: older zeldas on gc, ps3 emulation for all ps2/ps1 backwards compatibly.

3. What are the chances of Tetra's Trackers and Four Swords being on a 1 disc release together? and maybe pacman as a bonus?

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

1.  Given a GameCube disc holds 1.5gig, and given a ballpark "average" data rate of 4.7Mbits/sec [0.59Mbytes/sec] for full-screen MPEG-2/DVD video (4.7 is just an average value, not strictly employed in all cases, since DVD motion picture distributors encode their footage with varying data rates as they see fit.  Data rates for widescreen video tend to be smaller than "4.7" due to their cropped resolutions, reducing the amount of appropriate storage size needed.), a GameCube disc can hold roughly 42.5min of pure MPEG-2/DVD video data -- assuming VIDEO data ONLY, NO audio, NOTHING else.  Including DVD-format audio (AC3) would reduce that time considerably (though I haven't researched AC3 enough to tell how much of a difference at this point).

http://cube.ign.com/articles/372/372837p1.html
According to this interview with Factor 5 president, Julian Eggebrecht, Factor 5 was able to encode a whole full-screen 2-hour movie (video & audio) onto a GameCube disc using DivX video format.  In terms of vidoe quality, the results were on-par ("almost exactly the same") with the original DVD.  In contrast, a 2-hour DVD movie, including audio, is roughly 4gig+ in size. After reviewing the Hoth demo in the Rebel Strike bonus disc, I must say I believe in Factor 5's capabilities with DivX video.

Please correct me if necessary, I have not ripped many DVDs.    

[Grey Ninja]

1)  Professional 666 is 100% correct.

2)  The effects of emulation on current generation hardware is very minimal to tell you the truth.  Emulators are not easy to code, and to properly run the emulator, you must have a computer that is VERY cutting edge.  It's estimated that to properly emulate a GameCube on a PC, you would need a 5GHz processor.  That kind of power is not cheap (or available yet).  Emulating previous consoles also emulates their security flaws however, so it's entirely possible that providing backwards compatability for games such as PSO would allow a clever hacker to hack GameCube's successor.

3)  Pretty good is my guess.

[joeamis]

thanks, you guys came up with good logical answers

[the_zombie_luke]

Quote
Originally posted by: Professional 666

http://cube.ign.com/articles/372/372837p1.html
According to this interview with Factor 5 president, Julian Eggebrecht, Factor 5 was able to encode a whole full-screen 2-hour movie (video & audio) onto a GameCube disc using DivX video format.  In terms of vidoe quality, the results were on-par ("almost exactly the same") with the original DVD.  In contrast, a 2-hour DVD movie, including audio, is roughly 4gig+ in size. After reviewing the Hoth demo in the Rebel Strike bonus disc, I must say I believe in Factor 5's capabilities with DivX video.

That's awesome! I hope EA uses DivX for Return of the King. The Two Towers footage on GameCube was below DVD quality.

[Griffin]

I think Factor 5 is the only company using Divx on their games, but I could totally be wrong. DivX rocks though...the video quality is superb, and something all developers should use on GC games, provided it doesn't get in the way of multiplatform games.

[Bill Aurion]

3)  If TT is not included on the Four Swords disc I doubt it will be released at all...period...

[Gup]

3) I don't think it'll be in the same disc.  Nintendo wants to spread the GCN-GBA connectivity, so it would be best to put them seperately with a full-length game.  I see it going like this:

Four Swords - it's own game
Tetra's Tracker - sequel to Wind Waker since it uses some of WW's engine(i.e. Tetra)
Pac-Man - in one of Namco's upcoming games(I-Ninja or Pac-Man 2 sounds good)