Kostya's Boring Codec World

Ah, I still remember those days when FFmpeg got one new decoder once week or two.

Mike once mentioned here that one coder searches for ideas to implement. My situation is rather complimentary – I hardly manage to fullfill all requests from other people. Recently I’ve added two image decoders to FFmpeg – Targa (.tga) and TIFF. Both of them were done by request. The same situation was with Worms Video.

WavPack decoder was written by my own wish but there are already some people asking to write MPEG-4 ALS and Monkey’s Audio decoders. While the later is not possible to implement right now, I’ll implement both MP4 ALS decoder and encoder.

I just had to express that. Recently I’ve opportunity to examine two DVD disks – one with 8 films-in-one and another one is 7 films-in-one (our pirates usually pack at least two films on each disk). Every DVD has a proud label ‘Real DVD Quality’ (but sometimes even VHS tapes are marked so).
As expected, those films had slightly lesser resolution than 720×576, one disk had 352×576 films, but another one… 352×288 !!! If disk was labeled ‘Real VCD Quality’ – that should be fair.

I’ve committed today another decoder – for KMVC codec, used in Worms games. This is the final step to the completion of my task.
Multimedia Mike has a simple goal – to have a player which will play any multimedia file you like. My task for now is much simpler – have a decoder for each letter of alphabet.
With the latest addition there are only two letters left: E and Y. But considering that TSCC is now called Ensharpen and only known formats on Y are YUV variants, I declare this task complete. Future RE’ing will be just for fun 😉

Here is a list of codecs I reverse engineered in some way.

Codecs RE’d by format analyzing

• Apple QuickDraw
• Autodesk RLE
• Sierra On-line Audio
• TechSmith capturing codec (aka Ensharpen)
• Pinnacle/Miro XL

Most of those are RLE variants (actually 2 of 3 are MS RLE variants).

Sources->Description->New Code

• LOCO codec
• Duck TrueMotion 2
• IBM Ultimotion
• Winnov WNV1

The last one is re-created from tuner driver.

Binary RE’d

• Creative ADPCM
• Intel Indeo 2
• Q-team QPEG
• DSP Group TrueSpeech

Welcome to new BLOG dedicated to RE’ing of codecs. I noted, that posting a description of codecs helps very much in process of their RE’ing. This will be the place to do it.