Reimar and I were poking at Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes again. You may recall my post about MGS using Ogg Vorbis for audio. In addition to the vox.dat file, there is another resource file called movie.dat. I don’t know why I wasn’t too interested in this file before; maybe because I didn’t remember any pre-rendered FMV in MGS (it is primarily real-time rendered). But when I really think about it, I remember there was a small number of ponderous cut scenes that used some regular film-type material.

Reimar’s Extractor-GTK tool makes short work of both the vox.dat and movie.dat resource archives. Guess what Reimar noticed in certain files living inside movie.dat? The signature ’13PV’, or VP31 backwards. So you know the drill: Wiki page and samples.

The data at the start of the file definitely looks like VP31 (e.g., the bytes starting with hex 32 00 08 in mgs1-40.bin). The files are probably pure video (audio and subtitles are stored elsewhere). It is currently unknown how frames are split up in the file.