I finally got up out of my chair, ambled across the room to my big CD-ROM folder, got out the Mad Dog McCree disc, unpacked the LIB GRAF file, so that I could finally test and commit Peter Ross’ ALG-MM playback system for FFmpeg. If you have any of the very early multimedia titles by American Laser Games you should be able to use the latest CVS version of FFmpeg to play the cheesy, low-resolution, low-framerate multimedia. Further, I have placed some select samples here.
Also, Alex has submitted a native FFmpeg playback system for the True Audio (TTA) lossless format. Next up: Kostya is working on a native decoder for a format I had not heard of yet called ZMBV which is apparently an open source codec used to capture video in the DOSBOX application.
You haven’t heard of ZMBV because it was just implemented about 2 weeks ago in DOSBOX. I was meaning to tell you but hadn’t gotten around to it. It’s extremely effcient; a 58-second sequence of the game Silpheed @ 640×400 res, 16 colors, and 70fps (not a typo, that’s the refresh rate of the video mode it was running under) is 6MB. Keep in mind that Silpheed is a space shooter so there was a lot of black empty space, but it’s still impressive.
Color and action have a lot to do with it; a quick shot of a 256-color 320×200 demo (also 70fps) 41 seconds long was 11MB.
It’s a lossless codec by all appearances. I get the feeling it’s a very very simple thing, like deltas->zlib.
Also uses xor’ing. And it is apparently supposed to support a wide range of color modes, though based on my reading of the official source I am not sure if they are all supported yet. Anyway, I have some 8-bit samples here: http://multimedia.cx/samples/zmbv/
XOR’ing! LOL, that was my very first animation format. You XOR one frame against the other, and every byte that was the same is now 0, and then you just RLE/lz77 the rest. To play back, XOR your delta’d data over last frame. That is hilarious.
Here are some more files:
http://bnobtc.pix-art.com/vgalemmi_002a.avi
http://bnobtc.pix-art.com/geoscape_000a.avi