Some time ago I mentioned that I’d stumbled upon a QuickTime sample encoded on NeXT using MicroWavelet codec which was used only there. I also expressed a regret of it being completely lost to time. And what do you know, it’s yet another situation where I’d be glad to be proven wrong—and I was (and I am).
Apparently had I looked around for a bit longer, I would’ve discovered more samples and a decoder to boot. Apparently that decoder was a part of NeXTTime and not QuickTime, which is a completely different thing. And NeXTTime including that decoder could be found on OpenStep 4.x in particular.
While I have not written a decoder for it yet, I’ve figured out enough details to talk about it.
First of all, it’s a sort of several loosely-tied codecs (and I’m yet to figure out what makes it choose which decoding path to take). One of them is a simple wavelet codec with 8-bit coefficients and no additional compression, others are delta coding plus zero-run compression plus optional compression of that data. Optional compression may be either static Huffman coding (with trees stored in a separate file bundled with the decoder—a bit like ClearVideo did it) and an individual tree selected per frame, or it may be LZSS.
It’s nothing outstanding but still it’s a rather curious codec from a rather curious obscure platform (Display PostScript anyone?). And as a final fun fact, it’s internally called “harsh” with the functions being named e.g. harsh_decode_skip. Hopefully implementing a decoder for it would be mild and agreeable despite the naming.