Karaoke CD+G support?

[underlord]

How 'bout supporting a very simple format? CD+G Karaoke files consist of an audio MP3 and a very low res graphic file .CDG. There are existing peices of work that support this format, however they are few and far between.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdg123/

I can help provide information on decoding the .CDG file, and even supply original CD+G's and encoded files. http://vipkaraoke.com Check out the songs section. I've got quite a few of these files and would really like to be able to play them back on a computer. There are CD+G only solutions, but I would like to use VideoLAN's ability to play captured DVD rips to take advantage of the growing DVD Karaoke supply.[/url]

[The DJ]

The VLC core team will not do this, there are other more important tasks at hand. However if someone were to contribute the code we would more than welcome it.

[Smickers]

I'd like to see that too. Hope someone will assist.

[dumarjo]

yes me too this should be great

Jonathan

[anhlunnhaque]

Yes, I would love to see VLC supports CD+G...it would complete the picture of "The Perfect Media Player"...well at least for me..!!! I hope you guys implement this support in future releases....

Thanks

[ekin]

I too...would love to have VLC support CD+G....please please have the support to play CDG files...since VLC is know for a variety of different file support why not CDG...?? IT would be awesome !!!

thx

[The DJ]

The VLC crew is very limited in it's time, and without some japanese guy who loves karaoke joining the team, I doubt you will every see this feature.

[DGMurdockIII]

me too i like to see this

[ozzman32]

i would love be able to play back cdg files through vlc media player. i've been searching for the past three months online trying to find a suitable cdg player with no luck. vlc would be the ultimate video player! PLEASE ADD CDG PLAYBACK!

[DGMurdockIII]

please

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Really, code it... Or pay someone to do it.

[captainkaraoke]

I would think that looking at all the posts requesting this feature that it would be beneficial to you to at least think about adding it. To be so adamant as to say, this will never be implemented could alienate a lot of people who otherwise love your program (including me). I would love to see this feature. The results could be phenomenal.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Yes, we fully understand that. But we are short staffed, so this is not with a very high priority.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

This has been implemented in development versions of VLC.

Would you be able to test?

[CloudStalker]

However, this has been implemented in latest versions of VLC. can someone test?

Nope.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

However, this has been implemented in latest versions of VLC. can someone test?

Nope.

thx

[jazzsinger56]

Hi j-b,

"This has been implemented in development versions of VLC.

Would you be able to test?"

I've been using vlan since the beginning, and I work with cdg all the time, so I'd be happy to test and report ...

regards,
Cheryl

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Then use a nightly build version and tell us how it did work, or not....

[luke]

Hey,
I've downloaded a few nightly snapshots and CDG support seems to be basically working, all though there are still many problems...

Firstly it seems that in the latest snapshot I tried ( vlc-0.9.0-svn-20071022-0523 ) there has been some sort of regression and CDG playback doesn't work at all. Basically when you click the play button the slider moves and the play time increments, but no video window appears displaying the CDG. Hopefully this is a fairly simple regression, because an earlier snapshot ( vlc-0.9.0-svn-20071015-0002 ) does play back CDGs successfully.

There are a few other rough edges:

* When you open up a CDG file it doesn't play the associated mp3 file - so you get lyrics with no music. Basically .cdg and .mp3 files usually come in pairs. So you will have aaa.cdg and aaa.mp3 sitting in the same directory. The only way to to get both the music playing and lyrics displaying is to go to media -> open file, then choosing your CDG file. While in the open dialog you then have to tick 'show more options' -> tick 'play another media synchronously' and selecting the appropriate mp3 file. This is not really very intuitive - when playing .cdgs it should search for an .mp3 with the same file name, in the same directory as the .cdg and if it exists play it.

* Seeking and Fast forwarding doesn't seem to work very well - this seems to be because my cdg files don't include many key frames - so you just get the text from the point you fast forwarded to drawing all over the old text. Is it possible to just play every intervening frame even when seeking and fast forwarding? I know this will incur a performance hit, but cdgs are so small and simple even old PCs should be able to handle it. How does VLC deal with other video files that have very few key frames?

* The .cdg file extension needs to be added to the open dialogs 'filter' drop down. It probably should be listed under 'media files' and 'video files'.

If somebody can validate my username on trac (its just 'luke' ), I'll enter tickets for these items. All these problems occurred running VLC media player under windows XP. If anybody needs copies of the .cdg files just send me a message and I can e-mail them to you.

Thanks

- Luke

[fenrir]

In VLC, you just need to open the mp3 (and not the CDG), then the CDG file will be automatically found for you.
In fact, CDG files act just like a subtitle.
Doing the other way around will be a bit to intrusive in VLC.
Plus, that way you do not even need to add .cdg to the interface

Now about the seeking, yes it is an issue. As there is no index, VLC would need to replay the whole file from start and/or preparse the file to find synchronizations points (none except at the start in my samples). I will have a look but I don't promise anything

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Your trac account is deactivated. And CDG should appear as a registered format in the GUI.

[luke]

Wow, thanks for the Wow, thanks for the rapid reply. AFAIK selecting the mp3 didn't get the CDG to play. I'll try again tonight with the vlc-0.9.0-svn-20071024-0000-win32 nightly build and report back any problems and enter them into trac.

Thanks

- Luke

[luke]

I just tried with vlc-0.9.0-svn-20071025-0000 and all the problems I described still seem to be present. I'll be entering them into trac shortly. Is anybody else having any luck playing CDG with the nightly builds?

Thanks
- Luke

[jeffsw6]

Dear VideoLAN Team,

I was pleased to see some work on CD+G support in VLC. I would love to use VLC to play and transcode CD+G files. I tried the latest nightly build available to me on the web site, vlc-0.9.0-git-20080320-0003-win32. I opened an MP3 file and it automatically found the CDG subtitles file. Selecting the subtitle file manually also produces both the audio and video (CDG) playback. Using the transcode wizard does not work, and produces the below error text for me. I assume the GUI is building the command string incorrectly?

Code: Select all

File reading failed: VLC could not open the file ""M:\karaoke\T\Tim McGraw\If You're Reading This.mp3" :sub-file="M:/karaoke/T/Tim McGraw/If You're Reading This.cdg" :subsdec-align=0 :freetype-rel-fontsize=16". Your input can't be opened: VLC is unable to open the MRL '"M:\karaoke\T\Tim McGraw\If You're Reading This.mp3" :sub-file="M:/karaoke/T/Tim McGraw/If You're Reading This.cdg" :subsdec-align=0 :freetype-rel-fontsize=16'. Check the log for details.

In the two cases where playback works, the audio works perfectly. The video appears on the screen but only the left-most 1/4th of the video is displayed, and that 1/4th is repeated four times adjacently from left to right. The remaining right-most 3/4th of the content is not shown on the display. I wish I could get the transcode "working" so I could supply an example of the output.

In addition to the video output error, CPU use seems very high while playing MP3+CDG. These figures are relative to my hardware, of course, but I see about 4% CPU usage when playing mpeg4+AAC (iTunes-compatible) videos in VLC. Playing MP3+CDG uses about 25% CPU.

I would be happy to supply a CDG file (as some others have offered) for the developer who has worked on CD+G support, or would also PayPal them so they can purchase a karaoke song from a web site so their test content is properly licensed. I can test this again anytime as well.

Kind regards

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

So basically it works when this is automatic but not if you do it by hand ?

Probably a GUI issue, yes.

About CPU power, well, I think this is difficult to do, sorry, we have to build images from text in CDG...

Can you produce the conmplete log ?