Kostya's Boring Codec World

And now for something completely the same.

Let’s talk about most interesting block type in Bink. I don’t know official name for it but I call it pattern-run block because of the way it’s coded. Idea is simple: there are runs of single colour and blocks of different colours like in your ordinary RLE; what can be interesting in that? But there is one thing — block is filled with runs/copies not in usual scan orders but following one of 16 predefined patterns – columns, spirals, Hilbert curve (Zelda pattern for some of us), whatever.

Here’s an example:

(and SVG version)

I think it’s obvious how this helps block compression. The only bad thing about it is the fact it did not appear in Smacker (mostly because Smacker uses 4×4 blocks).

This concludes my series of posts about Bink.
“Works for me” patch against FFmpeg r19754 is located here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 4:22 am and is filed under Bink, Game Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.