Archive for April, 2009

A bit on Interplay MVE 16-bit

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

For those, who are interested in playing 16-bit MVE files (yes, Mike, I am talking about you) here are some bits of information I’ve gathered at my leisure:

  • you have to skip 16 bytes from block map at the beginning instead of 14 for 8-bit MVE
  • colours are now stored as 15-bit (obvious, isn’t it), and high bit may be set for pattern fill order (8-bit MVE just compared colour values, which still works)
  • for some opcodes pattern fill order was changed a bit (i.e. subblocks scan order)
  • some opcodes meaning was changed completely. Opcode 3 does not requires additional bytes to be read anymore.

I didn’t have a desire to complete it, especially because it’s no fun to debug how motion is stored, so I just hacked existing decoder a bit to decode 16-bit files. Here’s a picture produced by maimed libavcodec/ipvideo.c:

interplay16

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In the memory of my ThinkPad

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I bought my brand newrefurbished IBM ThinkPad 390 six years ago. While its hardware may be laughable by the current standards – PII-266, 192MB RAM, 4GB HDD – it was my computer where I started developing for FFmpeg. GCC compiling libavcodec/motion_est.c was the reason for adding 128MB to original 64MB of RAM. IIRC, all of codecs development till 2006 GSoC (VC-1 decoder) was done on it.

When I moved to MacMini, it still served me – as a router (it’s hard to see COM port on modern hardware, so modem was connected to TP390, later it was ADSL modem and second PCMCIA network card), as an x86 platform (mostly for running IDA and binary codecs) and for Internet-related stuff (cvs and git server, mail fetching, small web server, downloader and such).

Here’s how it looked for the last years:

i390

Rest in peace.

Now I have Asus EEE 701 working instead of it. Since it’s more compact, I can also fit BeagleBoard on the table next to it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »