Someone once asked on one of the xine mailing lists, “Is xine big endian or little endian?” Clearly, the person was confused but his heart was in the right place: He had heard about the endianness issue and that it affects machine portability somehow. Here is Multimedia Mike’s quick and easy guide to what you need to know about endianness and platform portability:
I have been working on this little by little but I think I am finally ready to announce that I have set up a MultimediaWiki. Originally, I wanted to create some kind of database-driven website that could supplant the useful yet infrequently-updated FOURCC list. Plus, I wanted to link to samples, document audio identifiers, and the feature wish list just grew whenever I brainstormed on the idea.
Then I started warming up to the idea of Wiki or, as I like to call it, “the poor man’s content management system”. I have started out with several major categories such as video codec list, audio codec list, container list, and company list. But there are other categories that we might come up with (I am thinking about tracking patents with this system).
I also want this Wiki to somehow supplant my page on undiscovered codecs. I think Wiki categories are the feature that are supposed to facilitate this.
One more activity I wish to promote with this Wiki project is distributed reverse engineering and documentation. To that end, I have started a page called Understanding AAC which will document the bitstream parsing and reconstruction processes for the AAC audio codec that the community will be able to use.
So, what more can I tell you? Get contributing and we’ll see if we can make this idea fly.
I updated the AVS format document today. VAG and I believe it to be correct. But we won’t know for sure until something (maybe me, maybe someone else) creates a fresh implementation based on the information.
Serge van den Boom informs me that he has written a Linux filesystem driver for the Opera filesystem. This is the filesystem that was used for CD-ROMs that played in the 3DO video game console.
I am so very jealous. I have wanted to write the filesystem driver for as long as I have been investigating old multimedia. No matter; the important thing is that the work is done. Now I have a backlog of at least 9 3DO games that I need to investigate. I am most curious to know if the 3DO port of Wing Commander III used the same custom FMV format and video codec as its PC counterpart.