Category Archives: Open Source Multimedia

News regarding open source multimedia projects.

Meet fusepak

I am pleased to learn that I may not have to go through the bother of implementing fusegraf after all. There is already a program called fusepak which mounts several different GRAFs onto the filesystem using fuse. Further, the author, Janusz Dziemidowicz, has expressed interest in implementing a BMS parser to allow an impressive amount of extensibility for fusepak. This part of the project is being written in (what I understand to be) an object-oriented, functional programming language: OCaml. If you have ever heard of this language, maybe you will wish to investigate this project as an academic matter. For my part, I’m looking forward to the finished product.


Caml logo

Profiles In Multimedia Hacking

Kudos to Reimar Döffinger for a new, clean implementation of the LZO lossless coding algorithm for the FFmpeg project. This means that there is one less external package that multimedia players have to rely on since there is an equivalent capability in FFmpeg.

I wanted to highlight this because it is useful when someone undertakes to re-implement a decoder from another package as another FFmpeg module. This has happened a number of times already, in the cases of Vorbis, FLAC, and VP3, for example. Remember, reverse engineering also applies to understanding bodies of code written in higher level languages than ASM and re-implementing them based on your newfound understanding.

For eye candy, check out Reimar’s “show your work” handwritten notes for understanding the LZO decoder. The original LZO decoder seemed to have so many labels and goto statements that it might as well have been written in straight ASM.

U.S. Government Multimedia Hackers

xine colleague James Courtier-Dutton informs of a curious story via the xine-devel mailing list: Homeland Security helps secure open-source code. It seems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to run code audits on a number of increasingly-used multimedia applications. On the TODO list are xine and MPlayer.


DHS Seal

It’s weird to think the government is commissioning to improve code I helped write. But multimedia players are certainly not exempt from security bugs– one of my more humbling experiences was when a code audit made be students of D.J. Bernstein’s security class found a careless buffer overflow condition in one of xine demuxer modules.