I wanted to see if the video frames inside these newly discovered ACDV-AVI files were just regular JPEG frames stuffed inside an AVI file. JPEG is a picky matter and many companies have derived their own custom bastardizations of the format. So I just wanted to separate out the data frames into individual JPEG files and see if they could be decoded with other picture viewers. Maybe FFmpeg can already do it using the right combination of command line options. Or maybe it’s trivial to hook up the ‘ACDV’ FourCC to the JPEG decoder in the source code. What can I say? FFmpeg intimidates me just as much as it does any of you mere mortals.

Plus, I’m getting a big kick out of writing little tools in Python. For a long time, I had a fear of processing binary data in very high level languages like Perl, believing that they should be left to text processing tasks. This needn’t be the case. pack() and unpack() make binary data manipulation quite simple in Perl and Python. Here’s a naive utility that loads an AVI file in one go, digs through it until it finds a video frame marker (either ’00dc’ or — and I have never seen this marker before — ’00AC’) and writes the frame to its own file.

acdv.py:

BTW, the experiment revealed that, indeed, the ACDV video frames can each stand alone as separate JPEG files.