Archive for December, 2009

2009 — a Year of Hopes

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Well, I think it’s time to look at FFmpeg achievements for this year.
Main achievement is without any doubt breeding Sus Scrofa Avionica — FFmpeg 0.5 release. It took only 5 or so years.

What has been added (mostly from Changelog):

  1. FunCom ISS demuxer and decoder
  2. various Electronic Arts formats support
  3. Gopher protocol
  4. MXF D-10 muxer
  5. Ogg muxer improvements
  6. VQF decoding support
  7. PCX encoder
  8. Cook multichannel support
  9. DPX decoder
  10. ALS decoder
  11. WMAPro decoder
  12. Atrac 1 decoder
  13. many other smaller additions and enhancements

What I did:

  1. out WavPack decoder now support hybrid coding as well
  2. PB-frames support for H.263 decoder, so Intel I263 files are played more or less fine
  3. some RTMP support
  4. Aura 1 and 2 decoders
  5. fixed long-standing bug in Interplay Video MVE — now it detects 16-bit variant of video (and decodes it)
  6. some improvements on SwScaler — 48-bit RGB support and rewriting our YUV to RGB conversion code, so SwScaler could be used under LGPL

But mostly this year gave us hopes for a lot of even more important things:

  1. there is hope that our AAC encoder will work
  2. there is hope that our AAC decoder will support SBR (and we can remove libfaad2 support)
  3. there is hope that RTMP input will work with all commercial servers as supposed
  4. Bink support is at least 90% complete, it’s mostly cleanup and bugfixing left to do
  5. Indeo 4 and Indeo 5 decoders. Boy, how I miss them!
  6. Apple codecs (ProRes, Intermediate codec).
  7. Sipro decoder will be hopefully committed
  8. hopefully, Windows Media codec family support will be almost full too, the only things left to RE are their speech codec, lossless audio codec, screen capture codecs and some WMV3 leftovers
  9. There is hope that some other unfinished work will be completed. For example, I have almost working LucasArts SMUSH video player based on some older work by somebody from ScummVM, MS Video 1 encoder. Other people for sure have some unfinished stuff too.
  10. I have a faint hope that Discworld 3 FMV will be playable with something opensourced. And then by FFmpeg.
  11. Finally, I hope Mike will finish his Xan WC4 decoder.

Posted in CEmpeg | 2 Comments »

Anthems

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Once I wondered about different anthems. Looks like one of the things Wikipedia misses on them is classification by content.

Personally I can split them into those categories:

  1. praise of the land — many anthems tell about features of the country like mountains, rivers, lakes, green meadows, whatever.
  2. praising love to the land — a lot of anthems say something like “we love this country”
  3. praising freedom — some anthems are mostly about defending freedom or how the land is good after getting freedom
  4. praising some symbol — mostly sovereigns or flags or people
  5. religious prayers or oaths to save or protect the country

One subgroup is anthems inspired or influenced by Polish anthem. They say virtually “That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.” ahem, sorry “our land is not dead while we live”. Ukraine and Israel have such anthems.

So, here are interesting ones:

  • Polish anthem — known for its dance music
  • anthem of Andorra — not so many anthems are sung from the first person view (i.e. like the country itself tells its story)
  • anthem of Moldova praises its language

My favourite is unofficial anthem of Sweden (since there is no officially approved anthem there). The ending of verse two is rather dear to me:


Jag vet att Du är och Du blir vad Du var.
Ja, jag vill leva jag vill dö i Norden.

Translation:


I know that you are and you will be as you were,
Yes, I want to live I want to die in the North

Indeed, I live in a country which sucks greatly, sucked and I know it will suck; I also want to live in some civilised country at North (especially Sweden). Någon, ta mig till Norden, är du snäll.

Posted in Uncategorized, Useless Rants | Comments Closed

A Short MSS1/2 Description

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

Some of you may have heard of such thing as Mi***soft screen capture codecs (aka WM Screen decoder). Here I’ll try to present some known information about it.

First of all, this codec employs old-school arithmetic coder — traking high and low values instead of low and range, normalisation by one bit, and it’s used for decoding everything (1-bit numbers, 8-bit numbers and symbols with variable probabilities) without any additional context-dependency stuff.

This codec employs predicting pixel value by its 4 neighbours (up left, up, up right and left). Intraframes and interframes seem to be coded in same way, but intraframes may have first line(s) data coded explicitly as 8-bit values (or was that palette?).

Each frame is recursively partitioned, final partitions may be filled with some value, restored from predicted values or copied from somewhere else.

Partitioning is done in this way: decode mode, if its value is 2, do something on decoded rectangle, otherwise decode partitioning value and use it to split rectangle horizontally (when mode is zero) or vertically (mode=1) and perform the same operation on halves.

Do not expect decoder to be ready any time soon though. At least not if someone else makes it.

Posted in Screen Codecs | Comments Closed

Pending work for FFmpeg

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Here are some pictures decoded with game decoders I’ve more or less finished in my free time:

While logotype in the middle should be recognisable to almost everybody (it’s from video file embedded in another player/converter for that format), others are not so famous.
Yes, colour planes are swapped but that’s not critical.

Left picture is taken from Wing Commander IV trailer packed with Xan codec. It has a very long history — it was 90% complete even before I joined FFmpeg project. The only caveat was that it outputs YUV format while Mike thought it was 16-bit RGB. Also nobody was interested in completing it (including Mike and me). Well, it’s almost there.

Right picture is from Descent III intro encoded with Interplay Video 16-bit version. I’ve looked at it once, almost got it right. Main thing I missed is that is stores motion vector data at certain offset, not along with other data as it did in 8-bit version. Now it plays fine though.

Another funny thing I remember is that there were complaints on detection of 16-bit variant. And what do you know? That information was available for ages at container description page. Sometimes it’s useful also to read Multimedia Wiki, not only write to it.

What next? I don’t know, there so many things to do — finish Flash Video 2 decoder, integrate Auravision 1/2 decoder before it rots, have another stab at some formats like Apple Intermediate codec or some codecs from Windows Media family.

At least I know that FFmpeg may be a bit closer to its one of unofficial ultimate goals — converting everything.

Posted in Game Video | 5 Comments »