PS1/2 Trying to improve quality on video files (intro/cutscenes) from various games

[Alex4nder001]

So I have a CFW’d PS3 on which I play PSX games. I have a massive 1TB HDD, so I don’t need to worry about space.

Some games (like Silhouette Mirage and Money Idol exchanger) have these intro videos, and others (like Parappa the Rapper or Resident Evil) have cutscenes. What bothers me is that they’re grainy/noisy (probably compressed) and it spoils the look (especially the anime styled intros in Money Idol Exchanger/Silhouette Mirage or the Cartoon look in Parappa).

So I hoped I could either filter out the graininess or manually redraw each frame, whatever works. After all, playing my PS3 on a 1080p HDMI monitor I really do expect the best! What do I need to know, and what tools do I need, to extract, edit and add the video back again (from an ISO or a .bin and .cue)? Googling only turned up results on how to tweak the graphics settings on emulators.

 

[FAST6191]

If they are prerendered videos designed to be played back on the limited capabilities of a PS1 then you are going to have a hard time doing anything meaningful outside of an emulator. Two main reasons
1) Adding quality back into a lossy format... you can get some but not a lot, especially not for something stepped on as hard as a PS1 game (inherently low resolution, low frame rates and probably CG low frame rates at that which makes motion based algorithms less useful than for stuff taken with a video camera, massive compression...).
2) You are still going to be playing it back on effectively the same hardware with the same limitations. In some cases there might be scope to replace the decoder with a more potent one (the machine I am writing this on now will decode MPEG1 just as easily as it will H265). For the PS1 though... not so much. Best you might hope for is some kind of lossless video and extending the iso format to handle the inherent size difference that will result (possibly also virtual read speed to get it in memory fast enough). For a PC emulator you can do things like write external scripts; all those nice lua supporting emulators the tool assisted speedrun folks use can call external programs to do things, playing a video from your hard drive being nothing too drastic there but the same for the ps3 would be a bigger ask (more than theoretically possible but nobody is likely to put the effort in as few do on any console emulator, never mind something as annoying as PS1 on PS3, doubly so if it is the baked in emulators from Sony you are using as you are adding assembly hacking in on top of it).

For 1) if the game exists on another system (PC for instance, though later remakes can be a source too) or you can rerender it somehow (be it recreate from scratch or use the game to assist) that would also help.

If it was a matter of changing textures or rendered game sections that would be one thing (and annoying if doing it on a PS3 compared to a PC). Video is its own thing and hopefully I have shown some of why it is hard to sort the way you want.