Some time ago, Alex Beregszaszi and I created an FFmpeg video decoder to handle Duck TrueMotion 1 data. However, there are two major variations of this data format: 16-bit and 24-bit. The FFmpeg decoder presently only handles 16-bit data. There is a non-negligible number of games from the mid- to late-1990s that used this format for their FMV and many of them use the 24-bit variant.
I am still fascinated by the ZeldaClassic project, particularly when it comes to the possibility of creating an interoperable game engine to play the ZC data files.
Fortunately, the project has released some source code that writes out an unencoded quest file (extension .qsu). This divulges quite a few useful details. For greater context, there is the ZQuest editor that is packaged with the ZeldaClassic game which allows you to create qsu files and tweak existing ones. Further, PureZC has a Wiki that clarifies a lot of the technical details of the game’s data structures.
Anyway, I have started writing clear documentation for the qsu file format. Also, I have a sample C program that parses many of the data structures in such files.
Alex Beregszaszi has been working out the details of another motion JPEG (MJPEG) variant, this one comes from Ingenient.
See Alex’s article for the codec’s application.
Check out his format information here.
I just learned that a new version of DivX (version 6) is available when I found a file on BitTorrent that mentioned DivX6 in the filename. Fortunately, the file uses the fourcc DX50 which implies that the bitstream syntax is the same as the previous version. Version 6 of the encoder likely features general improvements to the encoding engine but packs the data into the same bitstream (which is apparently compatible with ISO MPEG-4). The DX50 data decodes fine with FFmpeg.