Games published under the Eidos umbrella, most famously the Tomb Raider series, are known you use .RPL files for their full motion video (FMV). RPL appears to be a reasonably open container format and the details are in this document. The specific video codec used in this format is closed. It is known as “Escape”, internally identified as codec #130. (The audio format is also not entirely clear, but it definitely appears to be an ADPCM variant.)

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I think a lot about software reverse engineering. This is directly related to my interest in multimedia hacking. See, a lot of multimedia technology is available in binary-only form. The only way to get at the algorithms is to take apart the binaries and understand the low-level sequence of instructions.

My primary motivation for starting this blog was to be able to organize my thoughts on the topic of RE in a consistent format. Then I decided I would publish it since there are actually people out there who are interested in reading this stuff. I originally tried posting a series of papers on the topic. That was a little limiting as the papers are naturally evolving. A blog format fits the topic much better.

For those just tuning in, I often use these abbreviations:

• RE = reverse engineer
• RE’ing = reverse engineering
• RE’d = reverse engineered