Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

It’s A Classic

Behold– a printed and bound copy of the Apple QuickTIme specification. It’s okay to be jealous:


Vintage QuickTime Spec
click for larger image

It’s a bit outdated (version 2.2 from April, 1996), but that only adds to its value. I found it at the top of a scrap pile at work. What fortune! I’m certain this would fetch a handsome price on eBay but I am unwilling to part with such a rare jewel. That there are no similar auctions on eBay for the purpose of price comparison is just further evidence of the manual’s rarity.

MPlayer 1.0rc1 Reviewed

MPlayer recently blessed their latest 1.0 release candidate. As some readers may know, MPlayer is where I cut my teeth in practical multimedia hacking– that was 5 years ago, right about this time of year. Makes me sentimental just to think about it.


MPlayer logo

Other commitments have kept me from coming up with anything interesting for this blog. Instead, I thought I would see how well this release fulfills my original goals from when I embarked on this multimedia hacking adventure so many years ago. It runs on Linux, is free, and is open source, so all of those bases are covered. Now let’s see if it’s simple to install and can handle any file I throw at it (I’ll defer on the GUI goal for the time being).

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GameCube Multimedia Review

Poking around on a number of Nintendo GameCube games, I have found a pretty consistent mix of FMV formats. In due time, these will need to be entered into the MultimediaWiki:

  • THP files seem to be the most prevalent
  • H4M files have the markings of a hierarchical vector quantizer (like the letters ‘HVQ’); HVQ is also used in Sorenson Video 1 and LucasArts video
  • Electronic Arts games have a VID format which has similar markings as a number of their other evolved game multimedia formats
  • One game has 11,500+ Ogg Vorbis files; some of them appear to correspond via base filename to files with the extension .cib; I tend to think that these are corresponding video files
  • Sofdec files, as commonly seen on Sega Dreamcast games
  • DSP files, often paired as L and R files for stereo effect
  • occasional BIK files

Plus, there are a number of other audio files, probably encoded with a custom ADPCM format common on GameCube games.

Caimans Video Codec

Going back through some old posts, I decided to follow up on a codec named Caiman’s Video Codec For Gameboy Advance (new MultimediaWiki page). The official site has a number of movie trailers and anime clips encoded with some custom video and audio codecs. The interesting thing is that the samples are encoded as .gba files which are apparently ROM images that are able to be played in an emulator such as VisualBoyAdvance. Therefore, there are no clean multimedia container files (e.g., AVI) for study.


Caiman's Video in VisualBoyAdvance

Unsurprisingly, very few technical details are available. The technology page brags about how tweakable the parameters are, but mentions nothing about coding algorithms. Still, it’s interesting that these A/V codecs were designed and optimized for the Gameboy Advance.

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