Kostya's Boring Codec World

I was asked to look at this format used at least in Iron Helix game and it’s a somewhat interesting format.

It turned out to come from Macintosh. There are two small signs hinting on it: big-endian numbers inside the file and the fact it uses default QuickTime palette.

The container is simple but functional: there’s a header containing frame sizes among other thing, frame consisting of several records (usually it’s just video data and frame data end marker; the first frame has initalisation data chunk as well). Frames can have one of two compression methods and coded area size and offset.

Compression is just a slightly advanced RLE: codes 0x01–0x7F mean copying data, codes 0x80–0xFD are used to signal runs, code 0x00 is used to code long operations, code 0xFE is used to signal skips, code 0xFF is used for either runs of pairs or quads of pixels (depending on the run length). Each line is coded independently (i.e. runs or copies can’t go past the current line end). So what’s the tricky part there?

That’s compression method 1 and it works quite well. Compression method 2 is essentially the same but it codes lines in interlaced manner for which I haven’t managed to get a good picture in all cases yet (it seems to code more lines than declared sometimes and interlacing seems to be dependent on both decoded are position and height). But hopefully it won’t take long and I can document it in The Wiki.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2021 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Game Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.