Category Archives: Open Source Multimedia

News regarding open source multimedia projects.

Kostya’s Wild Codec Blog

I am pleased to announce that Kostya Shishkov has opened a new blog: Kostya’s Wild Codec World. Kostya is a talented codec hacker who has sorted out the details of the QPEG, TechSmith Screen Capture Codec (TSCC), IBM Ultimotion, Autodesk RLE (AASC), and Indeo 2, among other audio and video codecs, and has helped implement open source decoders for the FFmpeg project. His current target is Duck/On2’s old TrueMotion v2 codec. Soon we may finally be able to natively view the movies from the Final Fantasy VII PC game.

Head over to his blog and keep up with his progress.

PAVC: Bisqwit Forum Discussion

A few weeks ago, I posted a new thread over on Bisqwit’s Nesvideos forums about my experimental codec research: Custom Video Codec For Console Movies. There has been some interesting discussion regarding PAVC-related compression concepts and it is worth reading.

It has been a little while since I have posted a gratuitous console game screenshot. For a change, instead of posting a screenshot of a game of which I have fond memories, I am posting a screenshot of one of the most dreadful games ever published on the NES:

Heroes of the Lance

Thanks as always to MobyGames and their vast screenshot archive.

Getting Serious About PAVC

I realized recently that I have completed my initial goals laid out in this post. And since this is a post about PAVC, let’s start out with some pretty console screenshots:

Metalstorm, NES,
one of the most graphically complex games on the NES console

Continue reading →

PAVC: Palette Tricks

Looking forward to the intercoding portion of this codec, it is very common for palettized graphic animations to use palette tricks to achieve certain graphical effects. One of the most prevalent such uses is screen fades– rather than suddenly showing the entire screen, set all the palette colors to 0 and then draw the graphics. After a certain time delta, adjust the palette to dim colors, wait, set the palette a little brighter, and repeat until the screen is at full color. Perform the inverse process for a fade out effect.

fade-in frame #1