Google announced their webP format in 2010 as an alternative to other image formats. webP, based on Google’s VP8 compression, offered much smaller image file sizes for images of similar quality, and was pushed by Google as a way to save on bandwidth and storage by using webP on websites instead of other image formats. webP would also later support animation, which meant it could also be used as an alternative to GIF animations, which were traditionally quite large in terms of their file size, whilst still being of low quality.
Many sites and services have adopted the webP format, and most people have the ability to view the images as support has been built into all major web browsers for quite some time now.
One of the companies that has adopted the use of webP images include Google themselves and YouTube.
Google uses the format on some of their sites, and allows users to upload images in the webP format to google photos. You would expect that Google, the creators of the format, and an organisation that uses the format itself would make the format compatible with more of their services. If I want to use a webP image in a Google Doc, and I drag a webP image into the doc, it will give me an error saying that it is an unsupported image type. To be able to use a webP in a Google Doc, I need to use a program such as Microsoft Paint to first convert the image before inserting it. You heard that right, even Microsoft Paint has been updated to allow you to work with webP images. If I want to copy a webP image from a website, it is even more difficult. I need to download the image first, then convert it, then upload it. This is becoming more of a problem as more websites are beginning to incorporate webP images into their sites. There is also no way to tell if an image is a webP without checking, so I don’t know whether I even need to download an image in the first place unless I try to insert the image, download it, or copy and paste the image url. Google Drawings, Google’s simple cloud image creation and editing tool has quite a lot of the features you would need to quickly mock up an image, or even make a simple YouTube thumbnail even if it isn’t a full featured photo editing program. The app however doesn’t allow you to insert webP images, and doesn’t give webP as an option to export your drawing. The program does however allow you to export a drawing as a PDF, which is a document format, but doesn’t even allow you to export Google’s own image format.
The YouTube site itself uses webP, both for thumbnails, as well as the video previews that are available when hovering over thumbnails. To save on bandwidth, YouTube has begun to encode uploaded thumbnails as webP images for supported devices. The animated previews take advantage of the ability to create animated images to allow a single image to be used as opposed to multiple to create a video preview. In one video from YouTube, they even try to convince other site owners to start using webP images for their sites. Despite the fact that YouTube uses webP images for their own thumbnails, YouTube does not allow you to upload thumbnails which are in the webP format.
Don’t get me wrong, webP images are quite good due to their relatively small file size, even if they take slightly more processing power to decode. Taking images from a camera and converting them to jpeg, PNG, GIF, and webP using ImageMagick at 80% quality, the webP image consistently has the smallest file size.
Well that’s all for this video. If you have any other problems you’ve noticed with other products, consider leaving a comment about it down below, and maybe I’ll make it into a future video.
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Super Mario Brothers, released in 1985 is probably one of the most famous video games of all time, spawning countless incarnations and spin offs. Super Mario bros helped to define the modern side scroller and platformer genres. It’s simple mechanic of trying to get from the left off the level to the right by jumping on platforms whilst avoiding obstacles helped to cement it into the hearts of people everywhere.
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So how does scrolling work in Super Mario Bros? One thing to keep in mind that compared to many modern computers, the 8-bit NES is fairly low powered, utilising a variety of the cheap 6502 processor that was popular at the time. Another thing to keep in mind is how graphics on the NES worked. NES games worked on the basis of a 256x240 screen. Everything that you saw on screen was made up of 8 by 8 tiles in the background, which combined into 16 by 16 groups of pixels called blocks. 8 by 8 or 8 by 16 sprites could be placed on top, which could be placed anywhere, although only 8 of these can be drawn in a given scan line.
Many early games on the NES did not even feature scrolling, instead opting to use static screens for different levels, or games like 'The Legend of Zelda' only scrolling under controlled conditions such as when changing between these static screens.
One thing that you’ll notice playing the original Super Mario Bros is that the screen can only scroll right. As you run to the right, the screen scrolls with you, but if you decide to go back the other way, the screen doesn’t scroll back with you and you hit the side of the screen. If a power up happens to go off the left side of the screen, you’ve lost it.
This mechanic of the screen only scrolling one way is intrinsic in simplifying how scrolling works, in order to allow for Super Mario Bros. to have clean scrolling like it does.
Super Mario Bros levels can be quite long. The NES can not hold an entire level in memory, instead it can only load a much smaller section of the level into memory. It holds the loaded section of the background in what is called a name table. The NES can hold 4 nametables, which consist of one byte for each 8 by 8 tile contained in those nametables, as well as space for storing colour palette information for the background. Each nametable consists of 32 tiles in width, by 30 tiles in height, for a total of 960 tiles. This is 960 bytes in size, and the attribute table, which is what stores the colour palette information, takes this up to a total of 1024 bytes, or 1 kibibyte. A screen displayed by the NES uses one of those name tables, and the tiles from them are displayed in the screen.
Scrolling on the NES basically works by applying an offset to which part of the nametable is being viewed, and as the visible portion moves past the right-most part of the nametable, it loops over back to the start.
Now, the NES could use this for scrolling with one of these nametables, but then this would just be the same screen repeating over and over again, as this is the size of the visible portion of the screen.
Instead, scrolling on the NES typically uses what is referred to as mirroring, more specifically, nametable mirroring. There are a few different types of nametable mirroring, which all join up different nametables and are generally used when doing different types of scrolling. Vertical mirroring joins nametables on a horizontal plane to each other, effectively creating a 64 by 30 sized nametable, twice the width of what is visible on the screen.
This is all well and good, but this only accounts for a level two screens wide, unless you want to have the level repeat again. If you’ve ever played or watched someone play Super Mario Bros., you’re probably very aware that levels can be much wider than two screens. So how does Super Mario Bros. achieve having much wider levels?
This has much to do with the fact that only half of the nametable when using this nametable mirroring method is visible on screen. Because only half of the nametable’s tiles are visible on screen, this leaves the other half to have its tiles freely manipulated without this change being noticeable to the end user. When a row of tiles disappears off of the left-hand side of the screen, it can be updated with the tiles that come after the last tiles on the right hand side of the nametable. This process continues as the screen scrolls further, so that when the visible portion of the screen reaches the right of the nametable and wraps back around to the start of the nametable, the tiles there have been replaced, making it seem as though the level continues past this point. To answer the question why Super Mario Bros. only allows you to scroll one way, well the answer is that it is to simplify the scrolling process, as you only need to keep track of scrolling for one direction to replace tiles, as if you allowed scrolling both ways, you would also need to account for replacing tiles as you scroll left, which makes it a lot more complicated.
Of course there are games on the NES that do allow scrolling both left and right, and games like Super Mario Bros. 3 allow you to scroll in all four directions, but how that is done can be a topic for another day.
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2003. Back when Amazon was little more than a glorified bookstore, and when Netflix and Chill meant to order a DVD on Netflix and wait for it to arrive in the post. 2003 was a year before prevalent online video streaming, and although there were sites and programs like Napster and LimeWire which allowed you to download music and videos, they weren't exactly legal. The only real way to easily access films and TV at the time was to go to a video rental store and rent a VHS Tape or DVD, that or just buy the video outright. Apart from the lack of streaming, not everyone had a phone that they could use a a portable media player to watch videos.
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Video game consoles have had a lot of accessories throughout the years. So what about for watching videos on a portable console such as the Gameboy Advance? You are probably aware that in the West, the Nintendo GBA had special cartridges released in 2004 that featured low resolution TV show episodes.
In Japan however, Gameboy Advance Video did not exist. Instead they had their own system of playing videos on the Gameboy Advance. This technology is apparently so unheard of in the west that unlike for the Western Gameboy Advance cartridges, Wikipedia doesn't even have an article for their Japanese counterpart.
In Japan in 2003, AM3 created their own system for playing videos on the Gameboy Advance, a whole year before the Gameboy Advance cartridges were released. This system was called 'Advance Video', which admittedly has a name very similar to 'Gameboy Advance Video'. AM3's system used a specially designed cartridge that could play videos off of a standard Smart Media card inserted into a slot on the side.
These cards could be purchased either with content already on them, or as blank cards which could be taken to a kiosk to have an episode written on them. There were also packages that included both the adapter as well as a card, or you could buy your cards and adapter separately. After you watched a video, you could keep the card to rewatch the video later, or you could use a kiosk to rewrite the card with a new video. Something interesting to note about these cards, is that they are partially transparent.
These cards can hold up to 24 minutes of animated content on a standard 32 megabyte card, or 192 minutes on a 256 megabyte card. The videos are compressed using a proprietary video compression technology developed in conjunction by Act Image of France, as well as IMAGICA Corporation, which is also known for HDCAM compression.
4 titles were available for the launch in May 2003, and the adapter was available for 3200 yen. To use the kiosks to rewrite cards, it would cost you between 100 yen and 500 yen, depending on what exactly you wanted to write on the card. To purchase a new blank card, it would cost you around 1800 yen. These kiosks were called 'Advance Gacha', and were designed to be able to be set up in convenience stores and toy shops. This system was similar to the kiosks set up to allow people in Japan to write Famicom Disk System games onto disks. AM3 planned to set up over 10,000 of these smart media copying machines in Japan by the summer of 2005. These systems were distributed in conjunction with Happinet Co.
A large number of anime titles were made available. The original series announced to be distributed were 'Detective Conan' and 'Time Bokan'. These were all available on prewritten cards, with the first episode of 'Detective Conan', 'The Roller Coaster Murder' being available in a bundle with the adapter, for only 600 yen more than the cost of the adapter itself. That's a pretty good deal if you ask me, considering to just get a blank card will set you back 1800 yen.
With the initial release, you are also paying for the novelty of portable videos. Hasbro's VideoNow also launched in 2003. Although the VideoNow discs were available at a lower price-point, there are several disadvantages. The original VideoNow only worked in black and white, whereas the Advance Video supported colour. The VideoNow player could only be used to watch videos and had no support to play any games. The VideoNow had a much smaller screen, and did not support any kind of rewriteable format.
According to the website for lik-sang, a former importer of Japanese products, content for AM3's Advance Video was planned to be released in stores on CDs, which could then be later transferred to cards. It isn't known whether any CDs with content were ever made or released. This idea is however contradicted by an article by ASCII corp., which claims that the content would utilise DRM that tied data to hardware in order to prevent unauthorised copying. This DRM would make it very hard to write content onto the Smart Media cards yourself. The system adopted a special ROM-specific ID system recorded for each file, so even if it was copied onto a commercially available Smart Media card or even another card with a different video on it, it could not be played. This would be encrypted with DES encryption and use a 128-bit encryption key which would be recorded in the media ROM, and would need to be verified before a video could be played back. Despite this, data from computers and cameras could still be recorded to the memory cards, although this likely could not be accessed with the Advance Video adapter.
When the Western Gameboy Advance Video cartridges were released, they used DRM to stop them from being played on the Gamecube Gameboy adapter, as the owners of the rights to the television series were worried that users would watch their shows on a bigger screen, or even try to record their episodes. AM3's Advance Video adapters however work fine in the Gamecube Gameboy adapter. While we are comparing differences between the two systems, while the western Advance Video cartridges sat flush with the GBA as they were standard sized cartridges, in order to make room for the Smart Media card slots, the Japanese system required a larger cartridge. The adapter is 55 mm long, which is about 1 cm less than an original Gameboy cartridge, meaning it stuck out of a GBA by 2 cm. Interestingly, as the width of a Gameboy cartridge is also about 55 mm, this means that the AM3's Advance Video cartridge is a perfect square.
The player has several functions that can be used whilst playing back video. The system can play and pause using the 'A' button. It can also fast forwards and backwards, using the right and left buttons on the d-pad respectively and by pressing and holding forwards and backwards, you can change between 1x speed, 2x speed, 3x speed, and 4x speed. Some material would also support chapter menus, although earlier content such as the Detective Conan Roller Coaster Murder Case did not. Titles such as the Pokemon titles would support basic interactive menus which allowed the selection of either the main movie, or short commercials for other Pokemon movies.
The player contains no decoding chip, but instead uses the ARM7 CPU of the GBA in conjunction with the specially developed FastVideo codec to allow for video playback. This allowed the player to be built at a low price-point as it did not have to contain any custom chips. Video can be played back at 30 fps and at a resolution of 240 x 160 pixels, the full resolution of the GBA screen.
Lik-sang, also expected a wide range of content to be released for the system including animated content, aka. the anime shows, game and movie trailers, similar to what is available on the Pokemon cards, pictures, music, educational software titles, ebooks, as well as karaoke.
This is also backed up by a 2004 GameSpot article which claims that AM3 was also planning to release other peripherals that would work with different types of media. These included: Advance Picture for still images, Advance Music for music, Advance Comic for manga, and Advance Navi for maps.
According to ASCII, AM3 would release animated content at first, but planned to also release other content such as eBooks, so that the GBA and GBA SP could be used for educational materials. Nintendo however prohibited the company from using the technology to distribute any games or adult materials.
Looking at listings for the Smart Media Player on Amazon.co.jp (which can be found by searching for 'AM3' under the category 'TV games'), it can be seen that cards were released for many anime series including, but not limited to: Meitantei Conan/Detective Conan also known as Case Closed, Pokemon, Lelere's Genius Bakabon, Crayon Shin-chan, and Time Bokan.
These releases could have either television series episodes or movies on them. During the time of the Nintendo DS, smart media cards continued to be released with Nintendo DS branding on the packaging, although they were still the same GBA cartridge design. AM3 would go on to release DSVision, which was a similar concept to the Smart Media Player except it took Micro SD/TF cards and was housed in a special DS cartridge that looked similar to a DS flash cart.
The ActImage codec was announced by Shinji Hashimoto, the executive officer of Square Enix to also be planned for use in the GBA game 'Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories', which did feature rendered cut-scenes. Although from research I cannot find whether it was in fact this codec used to compress the video used in cut-scenes, it likely was due to this announcement.
In 2005, am3 would also provide 'Poke Park Advanced Navi' at PokePark, the world's first Pokemon theme park, which was a video utilising the Advance Video technology and could be written free of charge onto a card using an 'Advance Gachapon' system. They also operated a lending system there, where a guest could pay 2100 yen to rent a system with the card and movie, 2000 yen being given back to the guest on the system's return.
Currently, there does not appear to be much information on the internet about the AM3 Smart Media Player, or at least it is not easily accessible. Many sites that contain information about the product such as 'lik-sang.com' are no longer available, and many western sites did not cover this product as it did not have an international release, unlike Gameboy Advance Video. It is likely that the Smart Media Player was not released internationally, due to the success of Gameboy Advance Video, and it's much simpler nature only requiring a cartridge for each video, instead of a bulky adapter with fancy media cards. Some information can be found through listings on sites such as Amazon.co.jp, which is not normally used by people outside of Japan, which makes it hard for people to discover AM3's Advance Video smart media player.
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