{"id":226,"date":"2006-03-18T15:08:18","date_gmt":"2006-03-18T23:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=226"},"modified":"2006-03-18T15:20:42","modified_gmt":"2006-03-18T23:20:42","slug":"xan-binary-decoding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/xan-binary-decoding\/","title":{"rendered":"Xan Binary Decoding"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the time-honored tradition of avoiding real work, I made an extension to xine<\/a> that will decode Origin’s Xan codec<\/a> (FourCC: Xxan). This is despite my long-standing policy that I will not invest any effort into making open source programs leverage closed, binary code in order to decode data.<\/p>\n


\n\"Wing
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I have no intention of committing it to the xine codebase because, really, who cares? But let’s see MPlayer<\/a> decode Xan data! Ha! Oh, why do I provoke them so? They’re going to have a workable decoder 20 minutes after I post this.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you care, I posted the xine plugin code here: http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/xan\/<\/a>. This is based on M\u00e1rio Brito’s<\/a> extensive Wing Commander research. It needs a very large table for decoding (128KB of data expressed in ASCII text) and that’s contained in xandata.h[.bz2]. Ideally, I think that table is supposed to be generated by some DLL function. Xan samples and the xanlib.dll are located at the MPlayer samples repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This particular plugin is based on one of my old reverse engineering experiments<\/a>. The reason I took on this task is because loading xanlib.dll and calling into it isn’t especially difficult. At least, none of the relevant functions are dependent upon any external functions. Thus, I just used a few strategic mmap() functions and loaded the binary code directly into specific memory regions. Oh, the code only works on x86 architectures, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally — watch those WC4 movies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,22,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-source-multimedia","category-origin-xan","category-reverse-engineering"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t