Archive for February, 2026

Quicker look at QuickTime

Sunday, February 1st, 2026

Since I’ve done looking at game formats for a while (I’ve updated na_game_tool 0.5.0 release with the fixed extraction of old-style Cryo Interactive archives BTW), I decided to look at my backlog of unsupported (either mis-detected as audio-only or not detected at all) MOV files from discmaster instead. Of course the majority of them are files missing their resource fork (and majority of the rest are poorly-recognised data+resource forks in MacBinary II format; that reminds me I should improve support for it), and majority of the rest are files that I support already (like Duck Truemotion 1 or Eidos Escape codecs). And a good deal of the rest are Flash in MOV (not going to touch it). And yet there are a couple of files worth talking about.

  • 911602.MOV—remarkable for having JPEG frame embedded in QuickDraw stream. It made me finally write a decoder for it (but without JPEG support, maybe one day…);
  • a couple of .flm files turned out to have obfuscated moov atom (with something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike TEA if you care). Not something I’d like to support;
  • La88110mN1Hz2_20-07.mov—it turned out to be raw YUV420 codec;
  • Omni_324.mov—compressed apparently by MicroWavelet on NeXT. Intriguing but I doubt anything else can be found about that codec;
  • Music Chase .tmv—a very weird little-endian MOV format with custom video codec (I think I mentioned it before but I haven’t progressed since);
  • there was one Flip4Mac-produced sample (which name eludes me), but considering that it stores ASF packets inside MOV it’s not something anybody is eager to support;
  • some undecodeable SVQ3 files—apparently they are encrypted;
  • and finally there are some QT Sprite files, which seem to be (often deflate-compressed) frames containing several atoms with commands and occasionally image data as well. Sounds too hairy to support but again, maybe one day…

With AVI situation is somewhat better, there are some poorly formatted and encrypted/obfuscated files as well (plus damaged files from AOL archives that start at random position, so contents may be AVI file with some additional garbage in the beginning or missing few dozens kilobytes of initial data). Beside that I’ll probably implement PDQ2 decoder just for completeness sake. Eventually.

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