Despite how it looks, I still monitor Discmaster for new additions in hope there’s something interesting there. Sometimes there is, which I can either postpone for later or actually take a look and try to figure out how it works. Here’s a list of stuff I looked at and found at least somewhat interesting:
- beta version of VfW SDK contained a special AVI file that had a different structure and apparently can contain only single stream. I added a support for it to
NihAVjust for completeness sake; - ReVoice Studio discs contain some AVD files that are AVI files in reality. The problem there is that those files seem to employ Indeo feature for content protection and require an access key to decrypt data. For rather obvious reasons it’s not something I’m willing to pursue further;
- some Licensed Cartoon Property Activity Center discs contain videos that use ARBC codec. I looked at it long time ago at Paul’s request so I remember he wrote a decoder for it. But it turned out that there’s a version of the codec used in MOV—with the 16-bit values being big-endian now. So I also implemented a decoder for both codec flavours just for completeness sake;
- Video Toaster 1.0 (now for Windows, who cares about Amiga system-seller?) had some samples in RTV format. It turned out to be uncompressed interlaced video in packed format. I’ve implemented a decoder for it in
na_eofdec; - speaking of Amiga, there’s a game called Golem with animations in XFL format (that are raw frames in per-bitplane format). Those are not too interesting to support but there’s also a stand-alone video player featuring some game footage and its XFL has a proper format, with audio and palettes. So I supported it in
na_eofdec(since it’s not strictly game format).
There is at least a dozen of other formats that I found by searching for large unknown files, so currently there’s enough work waiting for me (maybe I’ll actually do something eventually too).
Please post links sometime to project source code so people can watch source code with rejoice.
Sure, now the post should have a link to your decoder. As for my stuff, those who know know, and crawlers should go annoy GitHub instead.
I currently use nihav in dexvert which discmaster uses to convert videos, I use it as: nihav-encoder –input input.ext –output out.avi –profile lossless
I then feed this out.avi into ffmpeg to convert to MP4.
For the ‘Hangman Movie’ Graphon ARBC QT file this doesn’t work, nihav says:
Timebase 1/600 is too much for constant framerate!
cannot determine stream map
Are there different CLI options I should be using to convert files ‘in general’?
Or something specific in order to convert this one?
That’s the classic problem: MOV may have a variable frame-rate and AVI has only fixed rate. If the framerate is low enough then making it constant by repeating some frames is trivial, but 600fps is too much. Currently you can work around it by forcing the sane output framerate, in the future I hope to add MOV support so variable framerate there won’t be a problem at all.
This command works for me and hopefully will work for you as well:
nihav-encoder -i Hangman\ Movie -o out.avi --ostream0 encoder=rawvideo-ms,pixfmt=bgr24,timebase=1/15