compressed 4:2:2 MPEG-2 or something else in games?
 

I want to know what is the color sampling for video games when it comes to MPEG-2. I could mostly detect motion artifacts but I just wasn't sure what they used, I'm guessing it's compressed 4:2:2 but any of you in the game industry could give me an correct answer.

Can you be specific as to what video games you are talking about?

Most games don't use MPEG-2 for "video sequences". They use proprietary codecs (usually the ones made by On2/Duck Corporation). That's why the video sequences are really soft or fuzzy looking with lots of blocking artifacts when compared to mainstream DVD video.

I think next gen consoles (PS3 and Xbox 360) "video sequences" will be completely hardware rendered using multicore PowerPC/Cell processors along with ATI's and NVidia's GPUs for true HD-quality "video".

Well, I put in a PS2 OPM (Official Playstation Magazine) disc into my DVD-ROM drive and played one of the videos using VLC and it did show "MPGV" in the video FourCC code area and I'm just guessing but I do think that it's MPEG-2 in the "Sly cooper" series of games. Is this true with all "PS2" games or do they really all use diffrent codecs depending on the developer?

Jack,

Was the video you played from OPM inside the actual video game (an intermission?), or was it a non-playable demo (NPD)? If it was a NPD, I could see how that would be MPEG-2 as those are typically played on DVD players.

If you could be specific as to what games you think are MPEG-2 DVD video, I can find out for sure. Another way to think about this is that most video games use the DVD-data format to store info, not DVD-video format (otherwise, we'd all be playing 'interactive' dvd titles, like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.).

Hi peeps,

If it's mpeg-2 for DVD-Video it's YUV 4:2:0,

Jake

Yes, it was an NPD, but still the video looked like compressed 4:2:2, and yes, I do know the diffrence between DVD-video and DVD-ROM, but still it did look like MPEG-2 and I think it's running @ 8Mbps, and the game series is called "Sly Cooper".

Just off the top of my head, I've never seen a DVD-Video disc authored in 422P@ML as a distribution format.

I contacted my friend at EA Chicago and he's never heard of 422 being used in NPD DVDs. However, he did say that if the animation is 100% digitally rendered at 60i, there is no noise in the image and that can give the image a percieved higher-quality (unlike CG movies which is rendered at 24p and therefore needs 2:3 pulldown and looks kinda jerky), so this is probably what you're seeing.