Kostya's Boring Codec World

So I’ve released my decoder for Actimagine VX and it’s far from perfect.

First problem is audio. While the codec itself it not that tricky (it turned out to be some LPC codec that takes 5-10 16-bit words per frame to code pulses and filter for 128-sample frame), but its data is stored right after video frame data so in order to decode audio first you need to decode video frame and feed the remains of input buffer to the audio decoder. Since I can’t do that in a sane way I could not test the decoder either and it’s there just for the informative purposes only.

The second problem is obviously video. I’ve managed to decode bitstream fine but reconstructed images are not bit-exact and in case of plane prediction this leads to ugly artefacts (essentially the target value wraps around and you have gradients from white to black or vice versa instead of almost flat dark or white regions). I’ve introduced a clipping which seems to help but this is not right and maybe I’ll fix it one day. Maybe even before Bink2.

And finally there are some problems with the demuxer. In theory VX files may have multiple tracks but my demuxer might not handle them at all and if it does then it’ll simply ignore anything but the first video stream.

So VX support is far from perfect but it serves its goal of proving that the format works as expected. And if it’s useful to anybody then it’s even better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2020 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Game Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.