ClusterVQA

tykkimies · Civilian **Joined**: 12 Feb 2022

Hello! I've worked on my own VQA encoder for a while now and I'm happy to share my results with all of you.

Enter ClusterVQA: A VQA Hi-Color encoder!

It's written in Python and available on GitHub at https://github.com/kannoneer/ClusterVQA.
You can download it by clicking the green "Code" button and then "Download ZIP".

Unlike ugordan's encoder it's open source and my hope for this project is to act as a "reference encoder" in the future. Others can use it as a base for coming up with faster and higher quality implementations.

Here's how it looks in motion:

There's still room for improvement, for example only PCM audio is supported, but I've made sure the videos play perfectly in Tiberian Sun, XCC Mixer and ffmpeg's 5.0 version. It's also command line only and needs ffmpeg for converting input videos to image sequences.

Also thanks to CCHyper, tomsons26, OmniBlade and UGordan for info on the VQA file format.

Anyway, I'm keen to hear what you think! Very Happy

Nyerguds · Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2022 10:16 pm Post subject:

Wow, nice work! Are there any plans for a 256-colour VQA encoder?

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Crimsonum · Seth **Joined**: 14 Jul 2005 **Location**: Fineland

Awesome! Always great to see ancient tools getting updated/replaced. Although, AFAIK the recent Bink support has largely rendered VQA obsolete for TS.

I guess what they say about tykkimiehet isn't true in this case #Tongue

t. kelaperse '11

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tykkimies · Civilian **Joined**: 12 Feb 2022

Nyerguds wrote:

Wow, nice work! Are there any plans for a 256-colour VQA encoder?

Thanks! No plans for 256-color mode right now. At this point I know the VQA format pretty well though but let's see.

Crimsonum wrote:

Awesome! Always great to see ancient tools getting updated/replaced. Although, AFAIK the recent Bink support has largely rendered VQA obsolete for TS.

Wow I had no idea! It's definitely hard to compete with Bink video. My original motivation for this was to encode realistic training data for an upscaling neural network but of course not full compatibility with the game is needed for that. At least ClusterVQA can act as a public reference on how exactly the file format is laid out.

Crimsonum wrote:

I guess what they say about tykkimiehet isn't true in this case #Tongue

t. kelaperse '11