I’m finally proud not too ashamed to present a side project I’ve been wasting my time on.
The rationale behind it is simple: I sometimes write throwaway decoders in order to check if I understood format properly or if I really want to see the decoded content. Usually it’s written in C with the same code (usually for dumping output as PPM image sequence or reading 16-bit value) copied over and over again. So I thought to borrow bits from NihAV and finally make a framework for handling output creation and various utilities for handling input (e.g. reading integers of different size and endianness). It’s still better than doing nothing and it may be marginally useful to somebody else.
Not all of the included decoders are completely my own work, some come from ScummVM via the documentation I created for them on The Wiki (but sometimes with improvements, for example they don’t handle compressed sections in PMV) and AV format comes from the Lord of the Rings engine re-implementation (again, via The Wiki).
I should also mention a nasty surprise. Apparently when AVI streams are sufficiently de-synchronised (e.g. the format pre-buffers a second of audio before sending any video frames) libavformat AVI demuxer (which is used by a lot of multimedia tools nowadays) switches to a different mode and treats palette change chunks as normal video data (which works wonders of a stream of course; and apparently nobody had this problem since the time I introduced palette change support there about twenty years ago; also my own player is unaffected). So for such formats I had to introduce manual audio buffering (it’s not nice but the alternatives are worse).
And some words about the releases and release schedule. I don’t want to bother my friend who hosts the public NihAV repositories to add another one and I want to get involved with the usual platforms even less. As the result I’ll simply dump source tarballs with a brief changelog on the site. Releases should happen irregularly, when I accumulate, say, another dozen of formats or have other features implemented (like detecting format by regex instead of just by extension or OpenDML AVI support for being able to output annoyingly large files).
But for now the source code along with some formal Git history is available at a NihAV special page. Grab it while it’s not that stale.