I’m back on the case with a new entry of my Multimedia Exploration Journal. I just processed 10 Sega CD & Saturn titles. It was all quite predictable, save for one new format that I can only generically refer to as the Amazing Spider-Man BIN format based on the extension of the FMV format and the game that it comes from. As with so many multimedia formats, I find this one absolutely fascinating. The reasoning on this is that it’s a neatly chunked FourCC format that has a custom video codec apparently designed to map neatly onto the Sega CD/Genesis video hardware (I still get confused about exactly how the Sega CD extended the Genesis’s video capabilities). The format appears to define tile chunks, tile layouts, and palette RAM in discrete blocks.

I just upgraded my principle blog anti-spam measure, WP-HashCash, to the latest version. I know that some readers have been blocked by this when trying to comment. In fact, I was even blocked recently when I tried to post a comment. Please let me know if WP-HashCash gives you any trouble.

I think that WP-HashCash uses a great idea to stop spambots by issuing a programmatic challenge to the client before accepting a client’s comment. This sort of thing has been proposed as a solution for email spam but would not be tractable without modifying the fundamental email protocols. I have never seen this blog nailed by spambots so I can only assume that the plugin is doing its job, which I realize may not be very sound reasoning.

Thanks to MultimediaWiki user Dashcloud who has been working on digging up old game-oriented multimedia documents authored by one Valery V. Anisimovsky over the years and entering them into the MultimediaWiki. Valery’s Game Audio Player (GAP) and associated website no longer seem to be around, nor is Valery. Under such circumstances, I have no qualms about consolidating the old data into the Wiki so that it may live on, and also be updated as necessary. Though if anyone has contact with Valery these days, please pass this post along.

It came to my attention the other night that Intel will be rolling out an SSE4 set of instructions. Here is the Wikipedia treatment including the new instruction mnemonics. You sort of have to be skilled in the art of SIMD programming to begin to intuitively make sense of nonsense like PSIGNW, PSHUFB, and PMADDUBSW.

This got me wondering, though: Did we ever have occasion to apply the SSE3 instruction set for general multimedia programming? All I remember from that set is that it had instructions to do add/subtract operations in parallel which apparently has application toward fractal programming which, in turn, has application in… making pretty fractal artwork, from what I hear.

Will there be any practical A/V codec use for the new SSE4 instructions?

Update: Guillaume Poirer had trouble with the anti-spam measures in the comment section (reminding me to get that software properly upgraded). Here is what he had to say:

SSE4 will surely be interesting as these instructions are to deal with integers, which are extensively used in video encoding. This is what Loren Merritt has to say about SSE4.

What I don’t understand though is why there’s no documentation about SSE4 (or whatever the official name is) on Intel’s website (but maybe it’s because I haven’t been lucky).

About SSE3, these instructions were mostly usefull for float/complex operations, which aren’t usefull for video encoding, though maybe they can be usefull for audio encoding, I don’t know.