Alex Beregszaszi has been working out the details of another motion JPEG (MJPEG) variant, this one comes from Ingenient.

See Alex’s article for the codec’s application.

Check out his format information here.

I just learned that a new version of DivX (version 6) is available when I found a file on BitTorrent that mentioned DivX6 in the filename. Fortunately, the file uses the fourcc DX50 which implies that the bitstream syntax is the same as the previous version. Version 6 of the encoder likely features general improvements to the encoding engine but packs the data into the same bitstream (which is apparently compatible with ISO MPEG-4). The DX50 data decodes fine with FFmpeg.

In my multimedia research I have purchased a lot of used video games and investigated a lot of full motion video (FMV) formats. Some of the material is beyond appalling. But I have finally found the cheesiest FMV of all:

Quite good, too.

A significant milestone in open source multimedia: A group of highly dedicated and talented multimedia hackers has successfully reverse engineered the QDesign Music Codec (fourcc: QDM2) and released an open source decoder implementation. As usual, it is a piece of the FFmpeg project and the source code is available in the FFmpeg CVS repository, just waiting to be plugged into any libavcodec-using application. Be sure to pass the proper extradata through to the decoder.

There are very few QuickTime files that can not be played using open source software.

Thanks to all the folks who were involved in this effort: Ewald Snel, Benjamin Larsson, Alex Beregszaszi, and Roberto Togni.