Since no one is quite sure when or if MPlayer’s samples archive will go back online, I am populating my own personal samples archive. I am trying to place online a decent selection of samples that are each, at most 4 megabytes. I think my bandwidth and disk capacity are a little more restricted than that of MPlayer.
Naturally, I am starting the collection with a sampling of obscure game-oriented FMV formats.
Serge van den Boom informs me that he has written a Linux filesystem driver for the Opera filesystem. This is the filesystem that was used for CD-ROMs that played in the 3DO video game console.
I am so very jealous. I have wanted to write the filesystem driver for as long as I have been investigating old multimedia. No matter; the important thing is that the work is done. Now I have a backlog of at least 9 3DO games that I need to investigate. I am most curious to know if the 3DO port of Wing Commander III used the same custom FMV format and video codec as its PC counterpart.
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.
The homebrew development PlayStation Portable (PSP) scene is alive and thriving. Yesterday, I alluded to the standard method for playing video on the PSP (MPEG-4 on UMD media) but the unit is probably capable of much more.
My web access logs have been showing links from all kinds of PSP sites. This is because a new version of the PSP Media Player was released. It seems that the player makes use of the YUV -> RGB conversion technique outlined in this paper. I’m glad someone has actually put this to use in a general application. The source code is available which appears to be a copy of the entire FFmpeg source tree with a few PSP hooks.