I don’t know why this did not occur to me sooner: Distributed reverse engineering!
Yearly Archives: 2005
FPS1 Revisited
Roine Gustafsson has contributed an open source FPS1 decoder implementation to the FFmpeg project. Note that there are 3 different FPS1 versions and the decoder only supports the first 2. But this is a good start. Check out CVS. And samples are here.
The Star Wars – QuickTime Connection
It was 6 years ago that George Lucas began savaging the emotions of old-school Star Wars fans by unleashing Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I have blocked out many of my negative memories of that film (which I only viewed once). Strangely, the fondest memories I have surrounding the film were of the downloadable trailers. Odd as it sounds, these QuickTime trailers were a large part of what inspired me to study multimedia technology.
In early 1999, the word was out that Apple had posted to the web these awe-inspiring trailers. The files showcased remarkably higher resolution than anything that was easily downloadable before. This screen capture of Master Yoda was taken from the first Phantom Menace trailer. For Linux users, the most notable feature of these new multimedia files was that they could not be played under Linux.
In you much fear Yoda senses, hhrrmmm?
MRI Update
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.