Monthly Archives: January 2006

Smacker Reverse Engineered

One of my contacts notified me that he has reverse engineered the Smacker multimedia system. Hopefully we will get a description published soon and put a fresh open source implementation out in the wild.


Smacker Logo

This is great. This is one of the oldest and most enduring multimedia systems in the field, and one of the most widespread– The official website boasts of its use in over 2,600 software titles.

U.S. Government Multimedia Hackers

xine colleague James Courtier-Dutton informs of a curious story via the xine-devel mailing list: Homeland Security helps secure open-source code. It seems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to run code audits on a number of increasingly-used multimedia applications. On the TODO list are xine and MPlayer.


DHS Seal

It’s weird to think the government is commissioning to improve code I helped write. But multimedia players are certainly not exempt from security bugs– one of my more humbling experiences was when a code audit made be students of D.J. Bernstein’s security class found a careless buffer overflow condition in one of xine demuxer modules.

On Portable Programs

Someone once asked on one of the xine mailing lists, “Is xine big endian or little endian?” Clearly, the person was confused but his heart was in the right place: He had heard about the endianness issue and that it affects machine portability somehow. Here is Multimedia Mike’s quick and easy guide to what you need to know about endianness and platform portability:


When the CPU interacts with the outside world, the CPU needs to worry about endianness.

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