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List:       xine-codec-devel
Subject:    [codec-devel] Vintage Multimedia Report
From:       Mike Melanson <melanson () pcisys ! net>
Date:       2002-11-28 2:38:27
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi,
	I've been at it again, purchasing absurd amounts of old software.
Today I picked up 13 titles at one shop. Here is a cursory investigation.


1.
First up is a "Movie CD" of Macross Plus. I thought maybe it was a VCD.
But it definitely is not. The CD has one big AVI and software to play it
in Windows 3.1 or 95. The codec is 'mvi2' which is not listed at
fourcc.org (although 'mv12' is listed with no other information). I see
that there was some discussion about this codec on the MPlayer users list
back in July, and there is a sample AVI file on the MPlayer samples FTP.
Here is a page with some information about the codec:
  http://www.synthetic-ap.com/qt/motionpix.html
To give you an idea of the age and the probable level of sophistication,
this is from the intro paragraph: "Another new codec has stepped up to
challenge the dominance of Cinepak and Indeo."

There is a company at motionpixels.com. But if it is still the same
company, they radically shifted their business focus sometime ago. No
trace of codec technology.

Curious item about the big AVI file: It has several JUNK chunks which
contain the string "David Whipple/Christian Huygen" over and over and over
again. There is a page about their achievements here:
  http://www.cp.com.uy/37/37descen.html
The article claims that the algorithm is patented but a patent search
didn't turn up anything. There is also a very curious reference to these
people on this page:
  http://www.angus.demon.co.uk/tq/altq.htm
The latter makes me wonder if this codec was used for games


2.
I found a LucasArts Entertainment sampler CD-ROM with demos of Afterlife,
Tie Fighter, and Mortimer. The reason I picked this up is that several
Lucasarts games use a game engine called SCUMM which is known to have a
custom animation format. The Afterlife demo does not appear to contain any
animations. The Mortimer demo contains many .san and .nut files which,
according to this page:
  http://scummrev.mixnmojo.com/help/res.shtml
are cutscene and font resource files formats, respectively. They have a
familiar chunked format. The Tie Fighter demo does not have any
recognizable animations, but lots of Creative voice (VOC) files, just like
the full game.

The CD-ROM also has a bunch of Quicktime videos including some schlocky
virtual reality videos with Cinepak/PCM. There is also a directory with a
bunch of Chrysler/Plymouth car commercials (who apparently sponsored the
CD-ROM). Interesting: I did find another sample of what I guess could be
called a category of QT videos (since I now have 2 such samples). The
video plays fine in XAnim, but is wrong in both xine and MPlayer, in
different ways. xine plays the audio in a distorted manner, while MPlayer
plays the audio fine but the video way too fast.


3.
Microsoft Interactive CD Sampler. No surprises here. Lots of AVI files
with Cinepak, MS Video-1, Indeo 3.2, Indeo 4.1, and even raw RGB video,
all with linear PCM.

Did you know that Microsoft published a rock climbing simulation? Moving
right along...


4.
Eidos Demos. I was curious to know if Eidos games have any common media
format. The disc has an AVI trailer for the game Daikatana. You may recall
that when this game was released in 1999 it was widely regarded as very
late and very bad. If you can believe it, the trailer was encoded in MS
Video-1. This was 1999, remember. There is another AVI trailer but for a
game called Anachronox. This is in Indeo 5.

The directory TOMB4 (presumably a Tomb Raider title) contains the Win32
Smacker codec DLL. This leads me to believe that the game uses Smacker
video files.

The disc also has subdirectories for FORMULA1, KAIN, OMIKRON, REVENANT,
TOMB3, TRGOLD, TR2GOLD, ThiefGold, abomination, commandos, cutthroats, and
gangsters. They each have a single executable, probably self-extracting
and self-installing.

Can anyone tell me in Eidos games are known to use Smacker movies, or if
they have a custom FMV format (or no FMV at all)?


5.
Critical Path, starring Eileen Weisinger as Kat. Ever hear of her? No?
Well, that's not exactly unusual for early multimedia titles. Anyway, the
game is comprised of QT files (Cinepak at at a painful 240x180, and PCM
audio), BMP files, and some WAV files.


	To be continued...
--
	-Mike Melanson



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