Archive for November, 2021

Looking at Flash Traffic videos

Sunday, November 28th, 2021

There’s this game (or interactive movie rather) called Flash Traffic: City of Angels from Tsunami media that had two editions: DOS one that used BFI videos and DOS edition that relied on special MPEG accelerator for its MPEG-1 videos.

The Multimedia Mike had some interest in it so I decided to look what’s so special about those MPEG videos and why they can’t be played (they produce a lot of garbage if played with the usual players).

Those files seem to be intended for playback only on the special hardware, namely RealMagic card (I’d rather have MPEGMagic card for hardware-accelerated playback of RealVideo thank you very much) that has a special driver for interfacing it (RMDEV.SYS and FMPDRV.EXE). The game engine simply invokes FMPDRV.EXE for MPEG playback and there’s no software playback (considering how powerful machines were back in the day, playing back 352×240 MPEG-1 videos on them was next to impossible, hence the need for special cards offloading the work).

So I had to look inside in faint hope to see what can go wrong.

First of all, I don’t have MPEG-1 specifications and I don’t want to pay ISO hundreds of francs for a copy (and I could not find them online). So I downloaded ITU H.222.0 and H.262 standards (that correspond to MPEG-2 systems and video standards but are free) and used them as the reference (H.262 even lists the changes from MPEG-1 video). Then I tried to hack a simple raw stream demuxer, packetiser and video decoder in NihAV to see what goes there.

The container format seems to be the standard MPEG PS so demuxing was not a big problem. Video has some problems though. The first sign is framerate code: by the standard it should be 1-8, in that video it’s 12. In libavcodec this code maps to an unofficial 12fps mode introduced by libmpeg3 but the file obviously predates that library by many years (and avconv reports 13.3 fps anyway for some reason). Also by analysing group start timecode and GOP structure it seems that the real framerate is standard 30fps. Thus my conclusion is that those files were coded in slightly wrong way and marked with an invalid framerate code to make sure that compliant players won’t try to play them (and only the special videocards will). And considering that even I-frames can’t be always decoded properly, the encoder they used probably was not compliant either.

It is rather hard to find out what’s wrong with the bitstream so I’m not going to continue the efforts but at least I checked it out and verified that the files are not fully compliant and can be decoded correctly only by chance.

Also now I have even less desire to play with MPEG formats but I’ve never been a big fan of them anyway.

Fun with LGT 5/3 wavelet transform

Saturday, November 20th, 2021

LGT 5/3 wavelet transform is the second simplest lossless wavelet transform (the first one is Haar transform of course) so it’s used in a variety of image formats (most famously in JPEG-2000) and intermediate video codecs. Recently I helped one guy with implementing it and while explaining things about it I understood it myself, so here I’m going to write it down for posterity.
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Raw streams support in NihAV

Thursday, November 18th, 2021

Sadly there’s enough MP3s in my music collection to ignore the format and I’ve finally implemented MP3 decoding support for NihAV. That involved introducing several new concepts which I’d like to review in this post.

Previously NihAV operated on a simple approach: there’s a demuxer that produces full packets, those packets are fed to the corresponding decoder and the decoded audio/video data is used somehow. With MP3 you have a raw stream of audio packets (sometimes with an additional metadata). While I could pretend to have a demuxer (that will simply read data and form packets) I decided to do it differently.
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NihAV: now with Flash support

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021

During my work on VP6 encoder I was contacted by Ruffle developer who was interested in it, one thing led to another and I licensed my decoder for the use there (the main issues were cutting off all the interfaces from NihAV that are not needed for it and selecting the license). But it’s over and they say it’s working fine. Meanwhile I got curious and decided to finally do what no other bit of open-source code could do: encode VP6 to FLV without relying on any external software.

In addition to the FLV muxer I also implemented all known decoders as well and that was uneven load. One evening was enough to implement two and half codecs: FLV1 (it’s just H.263 with slightly different header and block format), Flash ADPCM (a slight variation of IMA ADPCM) and a bit of ASAO. Another day was spent on trying to make ASAO work properly (I dislike codecs with parametric bit allocation like this one, at least it’s not a typical speech codec). VP6 modifications took minutes, Flash Screen Video was done in less than an hour, Flash Screen Video 2 took the rest of a day (because I completely forgot how priming works there). I wasted another day on hacking barely enough support for onMetaData packet parsing and the other codec-specific bits in FLV demuxer.

And now it’s ready and more or less working. It can even play H.264+AAC combination (remember when it was popular), the only codecs it does not support are Speex (I’m not sure if I ever want to touch it) and MP3 (this one I’ll deal with eventually and FLV will provide me with nicely split MP3 packets for testing before the infrastructure for handling raw streams is ready).

Now what to do next? It would be nice to have SANM/SMUSH support, maybe get to MP3 already (so nihav-sndplay is even more usable for me) or RE all those VoxWare codecs (I hope I can find the samples). There’s some interest for bearly functioning VP7 encoder too.

But who cares about that? I can encode VP6 into FLV now (even if I have no reasons to do so).