In my multimedia research I have purchased a lot of used video games and investigated a lot of full motion video (FMV) formats. Some of the material is beyond appalling. But I have finally found the cheesiest FMV of all:
Quite good, too.
A significant milestone in open source multimedia: A group of highly dedicated and talented multimedia hackers has successfully reverse engineered the QDesign Music Codec (fourcc: QDM2) and released an open source decoder implementation. As usual, it is a piece of the FFmpeg project and the source code is available in the FFmpeg CVS repository, just waiting to be plugged into any libavcodec-using application. Be sure to pass the proper extradata through to the decoder.
There are very few QuickTime files that can not be played using open source software.
Thanks to all the folks who were involved in this effort: Ewald Snel, Benjamin Larsson, Alex Beregszaszi, and Roberto Togni.
Kostya has ironed out the details of the Duck TrueMotion 2 video codec format and finished the FFmpeg decoder. Now it is possible to natively decode all 100+ AVI files on the PC version of Final Fantasy VII:
Check out the FFmpeg CVS repository.
Kostya has plodded through the long-open sourced, yet highly cryptic, code of On2’s VpVision and successfully reverse engineered a description of the Duck TrueMotion 2 video codec (fourcc: TM20). He then re-implemented a fresh version which is available in the FFmpeg CVS repository. Here it is in action, decoding the one known TM20 sample:
The video depicts something related to the unkillable Final Fantasy game series. The most famous application for the TM20 codec has been to encode the FMV in Eidos’ PC port of Final Fantasy VII. This game is known to use a bitstream-incompatible version of the TM20 format. So there is still some work to do on this codec before the Final Fantasy fanboys rejoice over being able to natively decode the FMV for this game.
Also, do you remember the basic Autodesk FLIC format? Did you know there are more variations of the format than you can possibly imagine? As much as I enjoy hacking on esoteric multimedia formats I just could not bring myself to care about these variations. This is mostly because I did not have sample files.
Recently, however, Steven Johnson has seen fit to implement several variations of the format including FLX and DTA extensions. The code is in FFmpeg’s CVS.