Ripped Official MAX ~ EXTREME Era Background Videos & Scripts

pkgingo, beware & AeronPeryton present...


Near the beginning of 2012, pkgingo, a member of another Bemani site, told a certain group of people that he figured out how to read the MotionJPEG files on DDR arcade discs. He contacted me and a few others to check his work before it got released. After ironing out some bugs, he released all the images and I volunteered to convert them to videos for use with the official simfiles in StepMania. Some months later after delays on both ends, testing different encoding settings and finally getting his blessings... Here they are!


In addition to that, while announcing this project to the public, beware began work extracting the videos from the console games as well. With his help the IPU videos from those games have also been ripped and will allow the collection of videos to be 100% complete. They will be added to future updates of this pack, more information regarding them soon...

There are currently 635 videos in total, comprising of all the MJPEG sets found on 6thMIX, 7thMIX, EuroMIX 2, and EXTREME. They've been encoded at their native resolution and at 30fps, which is the framerate the videos usually play at in-game.

For maximum compatibility and best preservation of the images (JPEG artifacts too, and oh boy are there a lot of artifacts), they've been encoded as XviD .avi files.

They are tested and work perfectly in StepMania 3.9 final, In The Groove/OpenITG beta 2, and StepMania 5 beta 1 so there shouldn't be a problem no matter what build you use. The videos are all about 200kB ~ 900kB each.

Official Background Scripts:
All of the scripts are drag-n-drop with the official simfiles here on ZIv.

! = There are some timing issues with the videos in this script.



Assumed Questions and Answers:
Awesome... What do I do with them? Our main goal was to get the videos out to the community. We want to get feedback on this project because there's going to be more in the future. pkgingo is working on ripping the MJPEGs out of the console releases now and I'm working on putting together a concise list of official background scripts using these videos. In the mean time, have at it. If you want to help assemble the background scripts please let me know.

These videos look horrible! These videos are small to begin with and made from heavily compressed JPEG files. Every single blur and artifact you see is also in the source material. We took great pains to make sure that encoding the videos didn't make them look any worse than they already did. Frame for frame, the videos looks EXACTLY like their source images.

Wait... why are they in widescreen? On all the mixes that use these animations, all the arcade releases at any rate, the UI covers the top and bottom of the screen. In a fit of efficiency, Konami only encoded the parts of the video that can actually be seen and just centered them (slightly high) on the 320x240 screen:


Now with the UI elements:


So they were most likely encoded that way to save disc space and because given the way they were displayed, you would have never seen the tops and bottoms anyway. This may not be the case on the console releases though...

Why are the filenames all random letters? Are you going to rename them? Konami stored MJPEGs on the disc the same way they stored songs, in terse codes that more or less or hardly at all represented the title of the file being stored. The songs are typically given four-digit names. The MJPEGs were given six-digit names. After looking over all the filenames I started noticing patterns:


The six-digit code is made of a single digit group, which so far is always J, a single-digit sub group ranging from A to Z but seemingly chosen randomly, a three to four-digit actual file name which is sometimes understandable, and (sometimes) a single-digit video order tag that typically starts at A and "counts" through the alphabet. This video is called "Run". There is *runb, *runc, *rund, and *rune so this is the first video in a series of five.

This is the closest thing to a name Konami left on the disc. With songs you can just use the song's title and almost never have any problem. But the videos aren't that cut and dry. So instead of creating another naming scheme on top of this (circle1.avi is not any better at telling you what the video is) we're just leaving it as is... for now.

Between the four mixes covered by this release there has been zero overlap in file names so they must have come from a single, curated source. Between 7thMIX and EuroMIX 2 there were a number of videos that got renamed though. They were assigned a new subgroup for... whatever reason. However the source names and the destination names of the affected files still have zero crossover. The names of the videos in the download represent the most recent name Konami used.

[I will post a complete breakdown of what videos came from what mix here]

Okay then, why are there some videos with numbers after them? Starting in EXTREME, I guess to save disc space, some of the animations were stacked on top of each other. All videos are 80 frames in length exactly. But some of the MJPEGs on the arcade disc have two videos in the same file, 40 frames long each (there is one really odd exception to this rule).

So because it was glaringly obvious that they were two different sets of images, I split them during encoding. They both have the same name as the file they came from and the numbers denote which frames were used in each video. I wasn't sure whether or not to do that at first, but since StepMania cannot start playing a video file in the middle (which brings up another important point), they were most likely going to have to be cut apart anyways. There might be more, but I only did the clearly obvious ones.

The other point is that the DDR games that used these MJPEGs could start playing from any frame (in any direction) as well as freeze on a single frame... and StepMania can not. So as scripts are being made new cuts and permutations of the existing videos will need to be encoded to compensate for this. I'll have these made as the need arises and try to have as little overlap as possible.

And the videos that are just numbers? Videos 11 through 18 are special. They were not in the same location as the rest of the videos, instead they were packed into another file that had programming data and as a result were simply fragments of code that pkgingo extracted out. Videos 11 ~ 18 are from 7thMIX.

You said there are videos from EuroMIX 2. Does that mean... The infamous Hardcore Washables? Yup. They are all in the main pack. I can't wait to have the official CAN'T STOP FALLIN' IN LOVE (SPEED MIX) video script from EuroMIX 2 staring into my soul every time I play it ...said no one ever.


Changelog:
2012-12-20 - Preview pack uploaded
2013-01-14 - Re-encoded jaffsa and jaffsb to fix a pixelation issue, swapped videos 10 & 18
2013-01-23 - Videos 1 ~ 10 given their proper names. Entire pack updated.

Credits:
Ripping - pkgingo, beware, AeronPeryton
Encoding - AeronPeryton
Scripts - CuzcoTheBlocky, SpyHunter29, exodus803, AeronPeryton

man awesome!
thanks a lot!

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I would give you a +5 but you already have one.

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Amazing! Thanks so much!

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Wow, directly from the arcade releases too.
You are doing the work of the gods my friend!

It may also be worth noting, that I have the UNIVERSE1-3 jumpbacks and scripts to upload. This has completely jogged my memory, greatwork!

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DIOS MIO, )

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I think the engine is coded to do them "20 frames per beat," hence why for example, the unicorn goes really slow during A's opening/build-up, really fast in it's chorus/climax, and a more normal speed in other songs like L'amour et la Liberte and TEARS. This way, they always line up with the songs/stepcharts, regardless of where they put them.

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Holy crap at this o.o

It's probably a bad sign that I recognize most of these. but I see my favorites

That would be awesome of you, I liked those videos too. I think all that would leave to be done is ULTRAMIX 2-4.


I thought this too, but pkgingo has a lot of technical reasons for why it should be 30. If I start doing scripts and find out that almost all the videos have to be slowed down then I might re-encode them to match.

Nice stuff, thanks for uploading.

How do I open them?

The ".001" is breaking the file.

Install 7zip (better and free alternative to WinRAR), download all the parts from MediaFire, open the first part.

But the .001 is conflicting with .7z.

7-zip can't open them.

Ex: It's put in Pentagon1.avi.001. The .001 has to be BEFORE the .avi. Otherwise, ".avi" is classified as a name.

That's because the archive is split, because MediaFire has a filesize limit. If you download all of the pieces to the same place, all of the data will be there and you can extract all of the files. If you don't, some of the data will be missing and it won't work.

Ah... okay.

You have the correct version of Boy5.avi and Boy6.avi, right?

Wow, thanks AeronPeryton! Now I have EVERY SINGLE PERFECT ONE!

Now all that's left is to update my 3 hour long DDR visualization jukebox (will be longer soon).

Aeron? You have Square5, right?

I can't find "Colors1.avi", and KL's...

So far, this is only the videos that appeared in the arcade. The home games have not been ripped yet.

What I might do is make a comparison chart so people can find videos easier and convert old scripts.

First, sleep...

the home games are what i've been working on, they're already ripped

Its possible add songs ... Extreme To Supernova 2 ? On Ps2