Archive for April, 2011

Some notes on video in LucasArts games

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Recently I’ve been trying to add video support from LucasArts games to Libav and I must admit it’s not that easy. While there are only two container formats (one for paletted videos and one for 16-bit ones) there are too many compression methods used for palettised videos.

Here are some known codec numbers:

  • 1­–3 (the same codec actually)
  • 5
  • 21
  • 37
  • 47
  • 48

Codecs 1-3, 37 and 47 are common in adventure games, so I have more interest in supporting them (and ScummVM has decoders for them). But starting with at least codec 37 they added subcodecs, so there are several compression methods may be employed with each of them (ranging from raw data to RLE to vector quantisation). That means a lot of reverse-engineering work to support it so don’t expect full-featured decoder soon. And there’s also audio.