How to rip PS2 FMV files - Step by Step Guide.

[seasons]

I actually did want to try to follow Castor Troy's method posted in the original post that started this thread, but those links were posted back in 2004 and they're pretty much dead (obviously).

I tried following a much more recent tutorial I saw posted on YouTube, but it simply Does Not Work.

My computer does read the PS2 disc when I put it in the drive, and when I found a folder of .PSS files on it, I was able to copy those to a folder in my desktop just fine. Okay, I wasn't expecting that to be so easy.

They even play when I open them in VLC. That's something I wasn't expecting either.

Even stranger is when I choose Media --> Convert/Save, I can select these files (choose "All Files"), click Convert/Save and then apparently convert them to mp4. This gets me playable, possibly editable mp4 files. I don't see what the drawback is here. Am I missing something? Does this not work for every PS2 disc? I haven't gotten around to trying to edit with this footage yet but am I going to have any issues with it?

Just seemed like a ridiculously simple solution for a problem that's plagued people for nearly 2 decades. What am I missing here?

[Mol]

That nova extracto is downloadable, this pooped up in ggl.
http://wonderblunders.blogspot.com/2013 ... -from.html
https://progamercity.net/game-files/269 ... tools.html

[Qyot27]

PlayStation 2 .PSS files are regular MPEG-2 in an MPEG container. If they're sitting there on the disc without any obfuscation, they should be readable by any standard MPEG-2 decoder, with or without correcting the extension.

What Castor was explaining was (IIRC) the situation where the .PSS files are there, but they're not just sitting around in plain sight in the disc hierarchy, requiring a parsing program to actually detect where the real binary data is and get it out (I don't know this for sure, as I don't have any PS2 stuff from Square readily available, but meh).

You can see this if you try to play one directly with mpv (T1OPEN.pss = the opening movie from R-Type Final):

Code: Select all

J:\>mpv T1OPEN.pss
Playing: T1OPEN.pss
 (+) Video --vid=1 (mpeg2video 640x448 29.970fps)
VO: [gpu] 640x448 => 640x480 yuv420p
[osd/libass] fontselect: Using default font: (sans-serif, 400, 0) -> E:/Programs/mpv-player/mpv/subfont.ttf, 0, (none)
V: 00:00:04 / 00:01:50 (3%)

or probe it with FFmpeg:

Code: Select all

J:\>ffmpeg -i T1OPEN.pss
ffmpeg version r93433+7 master-4d8875ec23 HEAD-4f45f01374
 contains: avs_newheader datetime new_pkgconfig silent_invoke versioninfo
 Copyright (c) 2000-2019 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Mar 21 2019 16:37:30 with gcc 8.3.0 (GCC)
  libavutil      56. 26.100 / 56. 26.100
  libavcodec     58. 47.105 / 58. 47.105
  libavformat    58. 26.101 / 58. 26.101
  libavdevice    58.  7.100 / 58.  7.100
  libavfilter     7. 48.100 /  7. 48.100
  libavresample   4.  0.  0 /  4.  0.  0
  libswscale      5.  4.100 /  5.  4.100
  libswresample   3.  4.100 /  3.  4.100
  libpostproc    55.  4.100 / 55.  4.100
Input #0, mpeg, from 'T1OPEN.pss':
  Duration: 00:01:50.01, start: 0.051800, bitrate: 16629 kb/s
    Stream #0:0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, bt470bg, bottom first), 640x448 [SAR 14:15 DAR 4:3], 15000
 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
At least one output file must be specified

J:\>

Even DGIndex can open it directly, proving that there's nothing special about the fact it has a non-standard extension. It's just a regular MPEG-2 file in a regular MPEG-PS container. This also means you don't even need specialized software to convert to H.264 or HEVC (if you wanted to); you can just use FFmpeg.

It's not inconceivable that some games might use some not MPEG-2 format, by loading a specialized decoder into the PS2's memory, but that's probably an undue maintenance burden and most companies would refuse to do something like that.