I know that I released version 0.2.0 merely two months ago while saying it’d probably take me a year for a next release. Well, that’s still true but I wanted to make public some quality-of-life improvements as well as move some formats from NihAV (mostly Actimagine VX) so those who care have a simple way of decoding them. That is why it is a micro release.
The main reasons for release are improved AVI writer and VX decoder. The problem with my AVI writer is that it writes raw video and audio and those tend to become large—so I introduced OpenDML support in 0.2.0. But as I didn’t thought it through, I simply enabled it for videos with large frames. Now it works automatically if the file gets large enough so you should not hit size limit unless the total file size will approach 4GB.
But even if it’s a micro release I could not release it with just those two things so it introduces support for two formats reverse engineered by me recently, two formats reverse engineered by me long time ago (both are called Paco), two formats also imported from NihAV and two formats implemented after the description or code produced by others.
As always, grab it from the dedicated page if you really care.
P.S. I’ll probably keep doing what I’ve been doing so far (polishing my code, reverse engineering random formats, moving some more format from NihAV to na_game_tool—in other words, nothing to show). Meanwhile there’s still more new and exciting stuff at Librempeg.
P.P.S. Two formats were added for a rather non-technical reason: I want to have in my tool decoding support for formats for each letter of the alphabet. So far letters B, O, W, Y and Z are missing. That is why I intend to import Beam Software formats support from NihAV, maybe implement Psygnosis YOP and some Westwood format if I can’t find anything to RE instead (and I lost my chance to name PMV and RLF after Zork games). In either case 0.3.0 will still probably take half a year to a year to get enough supported formats.
Great update! I’ve added most of the new formats to dexvert so discmaster2 will support these when it launches early next year. Thanks for making a great video convertor tool and helping preserve our digital video history.
I found 2 NXL videos that don’t convert properly with na_game_tool 0.2.5, the colors are all messed up:
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/21413/macformat_08.iso/mac/Demos/CYBER%20DEMO/CYBER1/CYBOOGIE/CB1.NXL
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/21413/macformat_08.iso/mac/Demos/CYBER%20DEMO/CYBER1/TRAILER.NXL
Just thought you may want to see them.
It’s not just the colours. This looks like a slightly different flavour of NXL2 with both different palette format (not VGA for sure) and different interleaving method too. If I make decode use old interleaving modes then the picture is mostly fine (the shape, not colours) but shifted by a quarter.
I’ll see what can be done about it.
It turns out that this version uses RGB555 palette (and as expected from Mac, little-endian one) and old interleaving method. Additionally it seems that the image data starts right after palette and there’s 256 bytes of garbage at the end.
Hopefully the second byte of the header is good enough to distinguish it from the PC version of the same trailer (in NXL2 format as well). So I’ve made a patch to make those two files decode properly (while not breaking that other NXL2 sample), probably it will go public with 0.3.0 version, whenever it will be released.