Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Didnt know about that. Thanks.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2024/04/30/...pril-2024/

The February, March, and April 2024 Dolphin Progress Report is live! Feel free to discuss this month's update below.

This is a special one - ten years ago today the first ever Dolphin Progress Report was launched! So we went all out! Also we used a TON of new things, from new image and video formats, new scripts, to experimental browser features! This report is SO different beneath the hood, and it's a lot better for it. I'm really proud of this one. Enjoy~

Nah, the progress reports only happened a few months ago. None of us are old enough for things that recent to be ten years ago yet, right?

(04-30-2024, 09:54 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Nah, the progress reports only happened a few months ago. None of us are old enough for things that recent to be ten years ago yet, right?

Right...

Congratulations on this milestone! This article is a worthy celebration. I'am very curious though what this sentence means: "and the last Dolphin Progress Report of the 5.0 era." 6.0 on the horizon?

(04-30-2024, 11:54 PM)Miksel12 Wrote: [ -> ]I'am very curious though what this sentence means: "and the last Dolphin Progress Report of the 5.0 era." 6.0 on the horizon?

Ten years of Dolphin reports! Dang, time sure does fly by!

(04-30-2024, 11:54 PM)Miksel12 Wrote: [ -> ]Congratulations on this milestone! This article is a worthy celebration. I'am very curious though what this sentence means: "and the last Dolphin Progress Report of the 5.0 era." 6.0 on the horizon?

Minor increase to 5.1 lol

(05-01-2024, 02:45 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: [ -> ]Ten years of Dolphin reports! Dang, time sure does fly by!


Minor increase to 5.1 lol

This ^^

Let's just skip 6.0, what about 7.0?

So here are the specific new features in this article:

• HDR photos (HDR AV1 .avif) - Unfortunately, only Chrome supports this at the moment, and a few Chrome derivatives. Still though, there was no way to show HDR otherwise, and most people use chrome, so I gave it a shot. The workflow wasn't too bad - take a screenshot with the xbox game bar or GFE in .jxr format, load that into photoshop (with a .jxr plugin), and then save that to AVIF (with an AVIF plugin). Adobe you really need to step up your game in file type support, jeez. Anyway, I don't know how well this experiment went exactly. I imagine most people didn't see the HDR photos in HDR, just on account of HDR's penetration. But there was a good bit of interest in HDR expressed, so hopefully it turned out ok? I likely won't need to reuse this format for a while though. Also this feature is bugged on Chrome for macOS, that was ~fun~.
  
  
• AV1 images in an .avif container - After setting up an AVIF workflow for the HDR stuff, I realized that (as of January of this year) SDR AVIF support was now available in every browser, and I could just... use it. For whatever. So I did! And this image format is awesome. Admittedly its competing with an image format from 1992 but, still, it's way better. It's able to handle a lot of situations that JPEG falls on its face with. Here's an example: AVIF JPG. These two files are basically visually identical, but the AVIF is one-third the size. It's a HUGE improvement! AV1 is amazing at maintaining fine detail while not ballooning the file size. It's great! I snuck AVIF into a bunch of images in this report, and saved a lot of bandwidth doing so. My experience with it was so positive, I'm probably going to default to AVIF for thumbnails from now on!
  
  
• AV1 video in .webm container - Since I was already experimenting with AV1 in image form, I looked into the video side of things. It turns out, AV1 is more or less available everywhere as of 2024! So I gave it a try and WHOA what a difference! Just look at these comparisons between two videos with similar filesize! h.264 AV1, h.264 AV1 However, AV1 support is still a little quirky. For example, in Safari there is no software fallback. So AV1 video will work on M3 devices, but on older M2 and M1 devices the videos will just not appear. Yay. So I dug out an old swapping video tag code we had from the h.264/VP9 codec war and repurposed it, so AV1 is preferred but it would fallback to h.264 if AV1 support is not supported. Worked like a charm! Safari users will just get worse videos I guess. But yea, my experience with this was great as well, so I'll also be using AV1 video from now on!
  
  
• HDR detection script (hand-made by sonicadvance1 and me!) - HDR AVIF is designed to be fail-safe: on an SDR display it will tone map to SDR seamlessly. In no situation will someone not see the image in some form. This is, of course, not amazing for an HDR image comparison, so I wanted some sort of detection script. It turns out that there is a way to determine HDR in browsers, through mediaqueries. We found some guides and whipped up a script, and were very happy - until we realized that this feature was for determining whether the device was capable of HDR, and not whether HDR was active. So if our HDR detection script was run on an HDR capable screen but HDR functionality is disabled or not working, like you know, a browser that doesn't support HDR Photos aka any browser but Chrome, it would still pass. UGH. However, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that while passing was vague and weird, failing was not. If the browser told the webpage that HDR was not supported, that would always be true. So I changed the test to present a FAIL image if the browser said it was a failure, and for nothing to appear in that space on a pass. Worked like a charm! I still wish there was a way to actually know the display nits or whether HDR was actually on or not, but security and fingerprinting and all that yea yea I get it. Still sucks though.