Kostya's Boring Codec World

Okay, I looked into G2M4 closer, here’s the output:

As with the previous beast, there are two types of images combined in single tile — so-called synthetic layer and natural layer. What you see if the first layer decoded.

Here’s the general tile structure:

• Compression subtype (top bits from the first byte).
• Transparency colour (three bytes)
• Number of palette entries minus one (one byte)
• Palette entries (byte triplets)
• Synthetic layer (16-bit BE chunk size plus deflated data, may be not present)
• Natural layer (probably headerless JPEG data, too lazy to verify)

Synthetic layer image is (after decompression) contains packed bitmap that uses palette from above, each row is coded as 8-bit flag [packed row data]. If the flag is zero then row data is present (that’s my guess, it always seems to be zero). Row data is just palette indices stored as 1/2/4 or 8 bits per index depending on palette size. Sample output you can see above.

Feel free to complete RE.

Just to clarify status: I’m not working on this anymore so anyone can pick it up and finish.

And here are some possible questions that might be asked but more probably won’t.

Q: who cares about this codec anyway?

A: Not me. VLC does.

Q: so why don’t you do it?

A: there are several reasons. First, now I have idea how it works and it’s not that interesting anymore. Second, it would require some debugging and I cannot run that decoder under MPlayer2 (and I don’t use Windows at all).

Q: but wait, there’s G2M4!

A: right, and it uses completely different coding. I might look at it but no promises either.

Q: so, how does it work?

A: the idea is simple. Every frame is divided into tiles and some tiles can be updated from the previous frame or not; some additional information (i.e. mouse cursor shape and position) is also stored in the frame.
G2M2/G2M3 use the technology licensed from Accusoft that combines JPEG and ELS-coded image.

Q: how do they do it?

A: the approach (I call it JPEG-Binary Koder or J-BK for short) is quite simple. Every tile has ELS-coded picture with possible transparency. Transparent areas should be replaced with headerless JPEG data (i.e. only scan data without any markers but with escapes).

Q: sounds easy, where’s the catch?

A: I’m too lazy to catch bugs in my quick JPEG decoder reimplementation and ELS-coded image requires some debugging which I can’t do.

Q: okay, I want to do it, where shall I start?

A: is it the first of April? No? Hmm… Okay, here’s what I would do: grab a copy of g2m.dll (there are enough of them around, in various sizes too), disassemble it.
Find the ELS thresholds table (referenced values are 0x10000, 0x12A00, 0x15C00, 0x19600, 0x1DA00, 0x22800, 0x28500, ...) — the function referencing it is the one used to update ELS coder state, go up from there. Feel free to look at the wiki entry about G2M. Bonne chance!