Category Archives: Open Source Multimedia

News regarding open source multimedia projects.

Sprechen Zie Linux?

I really ought to mention that I will be giving two presentations at LinuxTag, the premier Linux event in Europe:

Yep, I represent the “Loose Confederation Of Multimedia Hackers”. Distinguished. Anyway, the title of my main talk is clearly inspired by this blog. I plan to present an overview of different techniques used to get at proprietary algorithms needed to implement free software, including, but not limited to, binary software reverse engineering.

The second talk, an evening event, is another of my “Trash Multimedia” presentations where the audience gets to see where multimedia went right and wrong. The emphasis here will be on technologies that were reverse engineered.

So come one, come all! Also, I am by no means the only multimedia hacker scheduled for this event. Some other multimedia-related talks:

Linspire’s Binary Decoding Modules

One of Linspire’s big selling points is that it supports Microsoft Windows Media decoding out of the box. How does it do this? Several colleagues have written and informed me that Linspire has licensed binary decoding modules from Microsoft. Linspire’s packaged distribution comes with such x86/Linux-native shared objects as libwma2.so, libwma3.so, libwmv2.so, libwmv3.so.

So why is this such a big deal? My informants tell me that the binaries are un-strip’d which means that they have a lot of debugging symbols packaged inside. Thanks, Linspire.

Custom NES Video Codec

The 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is my favorite video game console of all time. I even used to maintain a native Linux NES emulator named TuxNES to help preserve the nostalgia.

Castlevania Screenshot <– Simon vs. the undead fish monsters in Konami’s original Castlevania

Link, the hope of Hyrule, takes on the Octoroks in the original Legend of Zelda –> 		Legend of Zelda Screenshot

But I love these: Videos showcasing tool-assisted “Time Attacks”. The basic idea is that the people behind the videos use a variety of feature-rich console emulators to get through games very quickly using some very clever methods. Watching a video from start to finish usually lets you relive the experience of playing through the entire game, all in 10-20 minutes, nominally.

The video is encoded with the DivX codec; the frames are each 256×224 at 60 frames/sec (for NTSC games; 50 fps for PAL games). Audio is generally encoded as MP3 audio at 32-64 kbps. As a multimedia freak, I have to admit that it is a little frustrating to watch these videos which are typically encoded with ISO MPEG-4 (under the fourcc DIVX). So I started to wonder if it would be possible to develop a custom codec specifically for coding this type of video, and losslessly.

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