Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Pushing Projects to Github

I finally got around to importing some old projects into my Github account. I guess it’s good to have a backup out there in the cloud.

GhettoRSS
https://github.com/multimediamike/GhettoRSS
I describe this as a true offline RSS reader. Technically, it’s arguably not a true offline RSS reader. Rather, it does what most people actually want an offline RSS reader to do.

I wrote this about 2 years ago when I had a long daily train ride with a disconnected netbook. I quickly learned that I couldn’t count on offline RSS readers simply because most RSS feeds to not contain much meat. Thus, I created a program that follows URLs in RSS feeds, downloads web pages and supporting images and CSS files, and caches them in an offline database which can be read via a local web browser.

I wrote more information about this little project 2 years ago (here is part 1 and here is part 2). I fixed a few bugs in preparation for posting it but I probably won’t work on this anymore since I don’t have any use for it (the commute is long gone, but I didn’t even use it when I was commuting because I decided I just didn’t care enough to read the feeds on the train).

xbfuse
https://github.com/multimediamike/xbfuse
This is a FUSE module for mounting Xbox/360 optical disc filesystems. Here is when I first discussed it. The tool has had its own little homepage for a long time. This tool has seen some development, as I learned from Googling for “xbfuse”. Regrettably, no one who has modified the tool has ever contacted me about it (at least, not that I can recall). This is unfortunate because the patches I have seen floating around which fix my xbfuse for various installations usually boil down replacing many occurrences of an include path in the autotool-generated build system. There is probably a simpler, cleaner fix.

gcfuse
https://github.com/multimediamike/gcfuse
Written prior to xbfuse, this is a FUSE module for mounting GameCube optical disc filesystems. I first discussed this here and here. This tool has not seen too much direct development although someone eventually used it as the basis for WiiFuse which, as you can predict, mounts optical disc filesystems from Nintendo Wii games.

Origin Crusader Media

A gleaming copy of the old Origin game Crusader: No Remorse showed up today:



Immediately, I delved in expecting to find Xan-encoded AVI files that would play perfectly using FFmpeg/Libav. Instead, I found a directory labeled flics/ that indeed has a lot of AVI files, but not in Xan. The programs attempt to interpret them as raw RGB. The strangest thing is the first frame often looks correct, if upside down:



The first file I peered inside had the video FourCC ‘RRV1’. Searching for this led me to this discussion forum where people have already been hacking on this very format (Origin games invariably get a heap of lasting love). The forum participants have observed that 3 codecs are in play in this flics/ directory, including ‘RRV1’, ‘RRV2’, and ‘JYV1’, which apparently correspond to the initials of certain developers. The reason that the programs identify the files as raw RGB is because the FourCCs don’t appear everywhere that they’re supposed to. Additionally, there are several trailers for other Origin/EA games stored in Cinepak format elsewhere on the disc.

It seems that I’m the person who added this title to the Xan wiki page, obviously with no first-hand evidence to back it up. Meanwhile, the forum participants speculate that the files are descended from the old Autodesk FLIC format (which would explain why they live in a directory called flics/). Corroborating strings extracted from the CRUSADER.EXE file include “FlicWait”, “FlicPlayer”, “Flic %s not found.”, “flicpath”, and “FLICPLAY.C”.

The disc also features a sound/ directory which contains AMF files. Suxen Drol already documented these on the wiki as Asylum Media Format files. The disc contains an ASYLUM.DLL file as well as a utility called MOD2AMF.EXE. The latter works beautifully on a random MOD file I had laying around. The AMF file is a bit larger.

See Also:

How Many Default Languages?

I was thinking back to my childhood, when my family first owned a computer. It was an MS-DOS-powered IBM PC. The default OS came with 2 programming environments, such as they were: GW-BASIC and batch files. It was a start, I suppose. I guess most any microcomputer you can name from that era came with some kind of BASIC interpreter. That defined the computer’s “out of the box” programmability.

Then I started wondering how this compares to computers (operating systems/distributions, really) these days. So I installed a fresh version of the latest Ubuntu Linux version (11.10 as of this writing; x86_32) and looked for programmability (without installing anything else). This is what I came up with:

  1. gcc/C (only the C compiler; other components of the GNU compiler collection are installed separately)
  2. Perl
  3. Python
  4. C#, as furnished by Mono
  5. Bash — can’t forget about the shell as a full-featured programming language (sh is also present, but not t/csh)
  6. JavaScript — since Firefox is installed per default, JS counts
  7. GNU Assember — thanks to Reimar for the reminder that if gcc is present, gas necessarily needs to be there as well

I checked on C++, Objective C, Java, Ada, Fortran, Go, Lua, Ruby, Tcl, PHP, R and other languages I could think of, but the above items were the only ones present by default. At the same time, I checked my Mac OS X (10.6) box and it also has Ruby and PHP installed. It has a bunch of other languages, courtesy of Xcode, so I can’t certify anything about its out of the box programmability.

Still, I think “embarrassment of riches” pretty well sums it up. I try not to be crotchety old fogey complaining that kids these days don’t know how good they have it; rather, I’m genuinely excited for anyone who wants to leap into computer programming in this day and age.

2011 In Open Source Multimedia

Sometimes I think that the pace of multimedia technology is slowing down. Obviously, I’m not paying close enough attention. I thought I would do a little 2011 year-end review of what happened in the world of open source multimedia, mainly for my own benefit. Let me know in the comments what I missed.

The Split
The biggest deal in open source multimedia was the matter of the project split. Where once stood one project (FFmpeg) there now stands two (also Libav). Where do things stand with the projects now? Still very separate but similar. Both projects obsessively monitor each other’s git commits and prodigiously poach each other’s work, both projects being LGPL and all. Most features that land in one code base end up in the other. Thus, I refer to FFmpeg and Libav collectively as “the projects”.

Some philosophical reasons for the split included project stagnation and development process friction. Curiously, these problems are fond memories now and the spirit of competition has pushed development forward at a blinding pace.

People inside the project have strong opinions about the split; that’s understandable. People outside the project have strong opinions about the split; that’s somewhat less understandable, but whatever. After 5 years of working for Adobe on the Flash Player (a.k.a. the most hated software in all existence if internet nerds are to be believed on the matter), I’m so over internet nerd drama.

For my part, I just try to maintain some appearance of neutrality since I manage some shared resources for the open source multimedia community (like the wiki and samples repo) and am trying to keep them from fracturing as well.

Apple and Open Source
It was big news that Apple magnanimously open sourced their lossless audio codec. That sets a great example and precedent.

New Features
I mined the 'git log' of the projects in order to pick out some features that were added during 2011.

First off, Apple’s ProRes video codec was reverse engineered and incorporated into the multimedia libraries. And for some weird reason, this is an item that made the rounds in the geek press. I’m not entirely sure why, but it may have something to do with inter-project conflict. Anyway, here is the decoder in action, playing a video of some wild swine, one of the few samples we have:



Other new video codecs included a reverse engineered Indeo 4 decoder. Gotta catch ’em all! That completes our collection of Indeo codecs. But that wasn’t enough– this year, we got a completely revised Indeo 3 decoder (the previous one, while functional, exhibited a lot of code artifacts betraying a direct ASM ->C translation). Oh, and many thanks to Kostya for this gem:



That’s the new Origin Xan decoder (best known for Wing Commander IV cinematics) in action, something I first started reverse engineering back in 2002. Thanks to Kostya for picking up my slack yet again.

Continuing with the codec section, Continue reading →