Codec Writers’ Humor

A fellow multimedia hacker, Benjamin L., pointed out that a reverse engineer might find some odd numbers in data tables while poking through binary codecs. For example, 0xbaadc0de and 0xdeadbeef. Sense of humor? Certainly. But why would such nonsense values be there? That is a question worth exploring. They sometimes turn up in codec data tables. Dead spots? Don’t-care values? Strange.