Some presentations from GDC08

[idsn6]

Has there been any motion toward overlaying realtime onto FMV a la Fear Effect? With compression as good as it's gotten, this might be an acceptable compromise between asset loadtime and cutscene variability.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

Worst of both worlds, IMHO.

 

[Fafalada]

This was on PS2, and we didn't mux gamedata into MPEG.

Well you don't absolutely have to mux to multi-stream, but yea, if your schedule didn't allow for that option, that obviously means no paralel streaming. Although yea, without muxing you'd probably run into disc bandwith troubles.

That said - my example was PS2 also, and the reason why I mentioned I-Frame only stream is because while it wastes some(a lot) bandwith and disc-space, it's got basically no CPU overhead, and above all, you only need one frame worth of data in the buffer to start playing video since there's no inter-frame dependencies.
I am familiar with the player you used though, so yea, that changes things a lot in terms of memory/processing requirements.

As to 0.1s, I have to ask if you're including seek times, and allowing for audio stream maintenance?

Well in bad case, seek would be another 100ms or so, either way it's close enough to instant start - it hides easily with fade or some screen transition. I'd guess Audio shouldn't really affect startup time, could just take part of that 400K for starting audio buffer.

Worst of both worlds, IMHO.

Dunno, on PS2 it made sense to me when I was playing with IPU stuff. You get low overhead for some fancy stuff in bkg, could even do panning cameras ala DMC, but make them look busier then any RT would. Nowadays I agree, it seems quite pointless.

 

[CNCAddict]

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gdc-2008.html
http://ati.amd.com/developer/techpapers.html

Nvidia has videos for those that of us who have no clue what all those fancy formulas mean