Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Beaten By A Puzzle

It pains me to admit that I couldn’t even produce a computer program capable of solving a Pickover puzzle (update: But Aurel Jacobs could; read on). This is another graph traversal puzzle. The setup is that you have an 8×9 graph with 8 blocked nodes:

* * * * * * * *
* X * * * * * *
* * * X * X * *
* * * * * * * *
* * X * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* X * * * * * *
* * * X * * * *
* * X X * * * *

Find a path that begins and ends on the same node that covers every unblocked square without crossing itself and moving only vertically or horizontally.

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First HD-DVD Hardware

This slipped by me for the first 2 months: Toshiba plans to release the first HD-DVD-capable hardware in the form of a laptop– the Qosmio laptop to be precise. Somewhere along the line the committee even came up with the following inspired logo:


HD-DVD ROM logo

The laptop sounds quite impressive, though. It can display a resolution 1440×900 on its 17″ screen. More interesting, though, is that the laptop functions as a portable entertainment center and is ready to be hooked up to an entertainment center with an HDTV and 5.1 channel sound. No price tag is listed yet. Who wants to be the first to bite, sparing no cost?

Then the tasks:

  1. get Linux installed on the laptop– how is Linux support on Toshiba laptops? I understand that Qosmio is a line of Toshiba laptops so there is probably some history of support or lack thereof
  2. get a commercial HD-DVD movie
  3. make sure Linux can access the raw sectors of the HD-DVD (via ATAPI?), maybe even mount the filesystems (ISO-9660? UDF?)
  4. figure out the AACS encryption scheme using the Windows player; find where the key lives and how to use it to get the plaintext content
  5. figure out all the weird and wonderful video codecs, audio codecs, subtitle formats, and navigation technologies employed on the disc
  6. … ??? …
  7. profit!, or achieve international notoriety

It feels good to have a plan, I know.

New AAC Spec

Hi! What have you been up to? Me? I’ve just been working on a new, “open” AAC spec by reverse engineering FAAD2. Why? Oh, I don’t know. I just have this obsession with documenting multimedia technology. I imagine it could prove useful if someone wished to, for example, implement a fresh AAC decoder.

Meet mlbms

Janusz Dziemidowicz has been making some nifty progress with his mlbms program for mounting game resource archive format (GRAF) files. Check this out:

$ mlbms bms/alg-lib.bms resource-files/alg-lib/maddog.lib mount/
$ ls -al mount/
total 1
dr-xr-xr-x  2 melanson users       0 Feb 26 23:05 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 melanson users    1120 Feb 26 19:07 ..
-r--r--r--  1 melanson users  305172 Feb 26 23:05 alg.mm
-r--r--r--  1 melanson users   24912 Feb 26 23:05 credits.mm
-r--r--r--  1 melanson users  314245 Feb 26 23:05 ibmlogo.mm
-r--r--r--  1 melanson users  338277 Feb 26 23:05 scen110a.mm
-r--r--r--  1 melanson users  278177 Feb 26 23:05 scen112a.mm
[... ad nauseum ...]

Slick, huh? I knew you’d think so. This command mounts the LIB GRAF from Mad Dog McCree as part of the normal filesystem.

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