Yearly Archives: 2005

Latest Apple Trailers

I got my AMD64 machine back in January and installed a native 64-bit Linux OS on it. One of the first things I discovered is that I could not watch most Apple QuickTime movie trailers since they used the QDesign Music Codec (QDM2) for audio which, until recently, only worked under Linux on i386-type architectures using Apple’s Win32 binary decoder. The xine team finished hooking up FFmpeg’s QDM2 support this past weekend (it’s in CVS right now). So I thought I would finally get to enjoy a tremendous backlog of movie trailers that have been piling up since last January.


QuickTime 7
Then along came QuickTime version 7…

Now, it seems that all current QuickTime movie trailers available directly from Apple have moved to using H.264/AVC1 for video and AAC for audio. I had seen that Apple was starting to post hi-def QT trailers (480P, 720P, and 1080P) but I was unaware that the higher variations also have 5.1 AAC audio.

BTW, if you want Apple trailers but do not wish to put up with working through Apple’s site to find the correct link, Dave’s Trailer Page has an amazing archive of direct movie trailer links in no-nonsense HTML.

Wouldn’t you know, when the open source community reverse engineers an implementation of QDM2 Apple quits using it for the majority of their material. The same thing happened in 2002 when the open source community got an implementation of Sorenson Video 1 (SVQ1) and Apple started using SVQ3. Fortunately, the community got open source SVQ3 support when SVQ3 was still quite common. But it’s like Apple is always one step ahead. Maybe that’s why I can never keep straight the 53 or so different variations of iPods.

Duck TrueMotion 1 Redux

Some time ago, Alex Beregszaszi and I created an FFmpeg video decoder to handle Duck TrueMotion 1 data. However, there are two major variations of this data format: 16-bit and 24-bit. The FFmpeg decoder presently only handles 16-bit data. There is a non-negligible number of games from the mid- to late-1990s that used this format for their FMV and many of them use the 24-bit variant.


Virtua Cop 2 Intro
Virtua Cop 2, Sega Saturn,
one of the Duck TM1-using games that uses the 16-bit variant

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The Format Of Zelda

I am still fascinated by the ZeldaClassic project, particularly when it comes to the possibility of creating an interoperable game engine to play the ZC data files.


ZeldaClassic

Fortunately, the project has released some source code that writes out an unencoded quest file (extension .qsu). This divulges quite a few useful details. For greater context, there is the ZQuest editor that is packaged with the ZeldaClassic game which allows you to create qsu files and tweak existing ones. Further, PureZC has a Wiki that clarifies a lot of the technical details of the game’s data structures.

Anyway, I have started writing clear documentation for the qsu file format. Also, I have a sample C program that parses many of the data structures in such files.