This blog has gone a bit neglected recently in favor of my totally corporate blog. I thought I would share an email I received today, the most remarkably bold phishing scam I have ever read:
Yearly Archives: 2006
Chinese AVS
Thanks to Stefan Gehrer for contributing a new video decoder for Chinese AVS to the FFmpeg project. It’s unclear how widespread this format will become, at least outside of the Chinese-speaking world. But that never stops our group from implementing support.
3DO Special
At long last, I have finally gathered up all my 3DO titles accumulated over the years and studied them with the help of the Opera filesystem Linux module. Thus marks the triumphant return of my inexplicably popular Multimedia Exploration Journal.
I have been curious about 3DO multimedia for a long time, ever since someone sent me some FILM files that he had found on the 3DO version of Lemmings using a custom tool to read the disc. Early CD-ROM-based consoles rarely had standard FMV API so the developers had to explore the emerging field on their own.
During this investigation, I found a number of the titles were published by Electronic Arts. A number of them used AIFF files for audio and a custom container format for what appears to be Cinepak data.
Son Of Early Adopter
Pursuant to my senseless HD DVD purchase a few months ago, fairness demands that I give equal time to Blu-Ray now that the discs are out…
Click for larger image
… even though you may have heard that the players aren’t available yet. Best Buy told me that the Sunday is the official day to start selling the Samsung player (no Sony in sight), though some Best Buy stores allegedly accidentally sold some prematurely.
The box copy touts 1920×1080 progressive scan video. Subtitles come in 7 varieties including English, English SDH (what’s that?), and Thai. The audio is listed as English 5.1 (uncompressed), English 5.1, and French 5.1. Presumably, the latter 2 options are compressed. The package sports the Dolby Digital logo. How is 5.1 audio stored uncompressed on these discs? If each channel were allocated 48 KHz, 16 bits/sample, that would require ~8.7 GB of the 23 GB disc for this 126-minute feature.
Anyway, for those who want to look for hidden messages in the literature accompanying the disc, see below (click any picture for a larger image).