My main Multimedia Research Institute page has gone without update since I started this blog. Not a great trend. Tonight I added an errata document for the official Vorbis specification. Also, I start digging into my backlog of multimedia software since my last Multimedia Exploration Journal entry. I have about 50 titles stacked up. I did a quick review of 7 of the dollar-bin titles tonight.

I recently discovered Zelda Classic, a fascinating project to clone the classic Legend of Zelda game. This is what the original game looks like running in an emulator:

Why does anyone care? Look, it’s just a really cool game, okay?

These programmers created their own game engine and then cloned the original Zelda graphics for use in the game. But the real value-add is being able to create new quests, distribute them for others to play, and download other quests to play in the engine.

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We officially have new problems in the open source multimedia hacking community. QuickTime version 7 is available (but only for Mac OS X at the moment). Apple also has several high-def trailers with H.264 video available for download.

It’s always interesting to learn what search strings are driving traffic to this site. It seems that “vp70 codec” is beginning to supplant search terms related to On2’s VP6 codec. This could mean that people are beginning to encounter VP7 files in the wild.

The search string “how to play vp6 movies in ea games” has come up. This leads me to believe that some Electronic Arts titles are employing On2’s VP6 codec. Some of their development groups have seen the wisdom of using Ogg & Vorbis for audio. I wonder if they have looked into using Theora for video?

“ethical reverse engineering” has turned up in the search logs, much to my surprise. I encourage you to Google the term, though; it brings up some interesting stuff.

“omelettes” and “making omelettes” continue to be strong search terms. I have taken a bunch of pictures of my own omelettes for my food blog, Infinite Flour, but have not posted them yet. It does not help that omelettes are not very photogenic.