.sdf, .adx, conversion...

dj_ultima_the_great · Post by **dj_ultima_the_great** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 1:53 am

I thought of about three forums I could have taken this to, so I decided to keep it general.

I'm using Cube Media Player 2 for the first time (just to try out an alternate method for ripping videogames), and I'm running into formats that I've never seen before and I'm not entirely sure what to do with them.

.sdf - I can tell that this is some kind of video format, because I get video when I throw it in Media Player Classic. To be specific, though, I get this. Is that... separated fields... or something? As I always say, tech stuff isn't my strong suit.

.adx - an audio format of some kind, or so it's labeled, but I can't get any sound to play. Also, as opposed to the 42 video results, I get over six thousand of these.

What I'm mostly curious about is whether or not I can take these files - the video ones moreso - and turn them into something usable (.avi, preferably, but even if I got a .pss, .d2v, or .m2v, I'd know what to do with it.)

Any thoughts, techies? Thanks.

- Jen

dj_ultima_the_great · Post by **dj_ultima_the_great** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 2:09 am

Er... sorry. That's .sfd.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:54 am

Digging around a bit, it appears that .SFD (Sofdec) files are MPEG-1 video and some custom ADPCM audio packaged together.

Zero1 · Post by **Zero1** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:06 pm

When I saw Willen's post about Sofdec being MPEG-1 and ADPCM; I wasn't at all surprised when I read the first post and found out it was from a game. It reminded me of the Playstation FMV files (.str) which used MDEC (a codec similar to MJPEG and/or MPEG-1) with 37KHz PCM IIRC.

The ADX files are probably short samples (eg sound effects), custom ADPCM again.

If you could upload some samples I'd love to have a poke at them.

sayde · Post by **sayde** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 10:43 pm

If the sfd's can be loaded into Virtual Dub mod and then converted to avi, (if worse came to worse) could'nt you crop one half of the footage, and then use a resize filter from avisynth to stretch out the other half of the footage back to it's proper aspect ratio? Or am I missing something here?

dj_ultima_the_great · Post by **dj_ultima_the_great** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 11:52 pm

Okay, so apparently ripping the game the tried and true way gets me the same results with the image. In other words, even the .pss file gives me a split screen. What the hell is wrong with Onimusha 4??? o.o

@sayde: I tried that just now, out of curiosity, and it seems to work. It also didn't seem to kill the video quality like I was worried it might. Unless there's some unforeseen problem, I may decide to go this route (because I really want to use Onimusha 4 in the MEP).

- Jen

PS: Zero, here's that upload you asked for.

Zero1 · Post by **Zero1** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 6:47 am

I've looked at the file and so far it's about what I suspected. It would seem that the reason you get two images is because it is supposed to be interlaced. Now the reason you see it as two fields together rather than alternating fields like you expect interlacing to be like, is because the video is encoded as progressive, presumably because interlaced encoding is very wasteful. So I expect the hardware takes the first 144 lines and displays them on odd fields, and the next 144 lines on the even fields, in effect it splits the image into two and displays it in such a way that it is now properly interlaced.

I'm just poking around with the stuff I have on my laptop at the moment. So far I trying to load the .sfd with directshowsource in AVISynth causes it to crash the player, but you can of course load the .sfd into DGIndex, and treat it like a .vob to get a d2v, and load it via MPEG2Source. You can also demux the video while you are there if for whatever reason you wanted to re-mux it to MPG or MP4.

In fact it seems it is just standard MPEG-2, I loaded the demuxed MPEG video into a hex editor and the header looks fine (check out this thread where I explained hex editing MPEG-2). The header in this file is
00 00 01 B3 20 01 20 24
This tells me that the vertical resolution is 512, the horizontal resolution is 288, the aspect ratio is 4:3, and the framerate is 29.97, however DGIndex detected the framerate as 23.976.

What might work would be cropping the video into two halves and interlacing them. If the video is how I hope it is, then you could use whatever required to IVTC (just like with a DVD to make 29.97 > 23.976) meaning that progressive frames would be reconstructed, however the possibility is high that it's a pure interlaced video, in which case you won't rescue much of anything and would maybe be just as well off cropping and using one of the fields.

Unfortunately I cannot for the life of me remember the function to interlace sources, and searching didn't return anything useful because everyone wants to remove interlacing.

I was not able to get the .adx files playing.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:03 am

Zero1 wrote:Unfortunately I cannot for the life of me remember the function to interlace sources, and searching didn't return anything useful because everyone wants to remove interlacing.

SeparateFields() or AssumeFieldBased()? http://avisynth.org/FieldbasedVideo

It might be easier to crop half the frame, and resize the rest to the original size.