Duck TrueMotion-S

The FOURCC List affords us many scattered bits of intelligence on various codecs used throughout the history of multimedia technology. Duck/On2’s early TrueMotion codecs are assigned a variety of FOURCCs– such as DUCK, TMOT, and PVEZ– which may or may not refer to distinct TrueMotion variants.

Serge van den Boom informed me that the 3DO version of Star Control II made use of some TM variation named TrueMotion-S. The open sourced Star Control II effort includes code to decode this video. The relevant files are dukvid.[ch] in this directory. A sample (logo.tar.bz2) is available in my Duck TM1 samples directory. Interestingly, the bundle actually contains 4 files. The .duk file has all of the video data stuffed together. The .hdr file contains some header information. The .frm file contains the frame offset boundaries for the .duk data file. And the .tbl file apparently contains data for initializing the delta table to use for decoding the data.

I am not yet sure if the data is decoded to 16- or 24-bit video. If someone is willing to jump in and figure this out, it might help us sort out the remaining pieces of the generalized Duck TM1 decoder for FFmpeg. It stands to reason, however, that the data is 16-bit at best since Star Control 2 is such an early game in terms of the multimedia genre. The game is reportedly one of the earliest games that Duck TM1 was used for so it may be on the bottom rung of the Duck predictive evolutionary ladder.

9 thoughts on “Duck TrueMotion-S”

  2. Multimedia Mike Post author

    I know; I helped write the Duck TM1 decoder in libavcodec. :-) This early variation, however, was not neatly encapsulated in AVI files. The various pieces were split over a number of files.

  3. anonymous

    I tried to play videos from Star Control 2 3DO version and wasn’t able to do it. Am I missing something to do?

  4. compn

    some digging in google reveals two cdroms that use pvez decoder (and presumably pvez fourcc avi/mov files).

    http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6657/is_/ai_n28718178
    “Africa – Folk Music Atlas” cdrom

    google says its available at these libraries:
    http://pulse.uta.edu/ (univ texas in arlington)
    http://lms01.harvard.edu (harvard)
    http://discover.lib.msu.edu (michigan state uni)
    http://merlot.coe.edu/ (Stewart Memorial Library iowa)

    maybe we could get people to search for it at their local libraries. or even call up a library who does have it and ask the librarian for help. i’ve good results with asking librarians for help.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20020806154139/support.private.com/cdroms.asp
    “PRIVATE DYNAMITE” cdrom porno
    cant find much with google. there is a dvd with the same name, i’m not sure if its the same cdrom.

  5. compn

    btw, if you call the library and have the librarian email you an avi/mov file, make sure to get the pvez32.drv and pvezw32d.dll files too :)

  6. Multimedia Mike Post author

    Thanks for the research, compn. I happen to have some librarians on speed dial. I’ll work my contacts.

  8. Multimedia Mike Post author

    Thanks for the samples. I am in the process of retrieving those titles you recommended. Librarians can work magic.

  9. 4ecd

    Hello,
    I help creatr the original Forry Ackerman 4 CD set of Sci-Fi and horror.
    The whole CD was create with the PVEZ (PowerVideo) Codec via Quicktime .mov files.
    If you need samples please post your needs

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