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• Studying A Game Wave Disc

  23 novembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I picked up a used copy of game called Gemz — a rather flagrant Bejeweled clone — for a game console called Game Wave Family Entertainment System. Heard of it ? Neither had I. But the game media is optical, so I had to get it and study it.

  
  
  

  When mounted in Linux (as UDF), the disc is reported to contain 2.8 GB of data, so it has to be a DVD. 810 MB of that is dedicated to the movies/ directory. Multimedia format ? Just plain, boring MPEG files (very YouTube-friendly— here’s the opening animation). Deeper digging reveals some more subdirectories called movies/ that, combined, occupy the lion’s share of the disc space. Additionally, there are several single-frame .m2v files in a directory called iframes/ which are used to encode things like load screens.

  
  
  

  There are more interesting data files including .zbm files for images and fonts, and .zwf files for audio. I suspect that these stand for zipped bitmap and zipped wave file, respectively. They can’t be directly unzipped with ’gunzip’. Some of the numbers at the start of some files lead me to believe they can be easily decompressed with standard zlib facilities.

  Based on the binary files on the Gemz disc, I couldn’t find any data on what CPU this system might use. A little Googling led me to this page at the Video Game Console Library which pegs the brain as a Mediamatics 6811. Some searching for that leads me to a long-discontinued line of hardware from National Semiconductor.

  The Console Library page also mentions that the games were developed using the Lua programming language. Indeed, there are many Lua-related strings in the game’s binaries (’zlib’ also makes an appearance).

• Minimal Understanding of VP8′s Forward Transform

  16 novembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — VP8

  Regarding my toy VP8 encoder, Pengvado mentioned in the comments of my last post, “x264 looks perfect using only i16x16 DC mode. You must be doing something wrong in computing residual or fdct or quantization.” This makes a lot of sense. The encoder generates a series of elements which describe how to reconstruct the original image. Intra block reconstruction takes into consideration the following elements :

  
  
  

  I have already verified that both my encoder and FFmpeg’s VP8 decoder agree precisely on how to reconstruct blocks based on the predictors, coefficients, and quantizers. Thus, if the decoded image still looks crazy, the elements the encoder is generating to describe the image must be wrong.

  So I started studying the forward DCT, which I had cribbed wholesale from the original libvpx 0.9.0 source code. It should be noted that the formal VP8 spec only defines the inverse transform process, not the forward process. I was using a version designated as the “short” version, vs. the “fast” version. Then I looked at the 0.9.5 FDCT. Then I got the idea of comparing the results of each.

  input:   92 91 89 86 91 90 88 86 89 89 89 88 89 87 88 93

  • libvpx 0.9.0 “short” :

    forward : -314 5 1 5 4 5 -2 0 0 1 -1 -1 1 11 -3 -4
    inverse : 92 91 89 86 89 86 91 90 91 90 88 86 88 86 89 89
    

  • libvpx 0.9.0 “fast” :

    forward : -314 4 0 5 4 4 -2 0 0 1 0 -1 1 11 -2 -5
    inverse : 91 91 89 86 88 86 91 90 91 90 88 86 88 86 89 89
    

  • libvpx 0.9.5 “short” :

    forward : -312 7 1 0 1 12 -5 2 2 -3 3 -1 1 0 -2 1
    inverse : 92 91 89 86 91 90 88 86 89 89 89 88 89 87 88 93
    

  I was surprised when I noticed that input[] != idct(fdct(input[])) in some of the above cases. Then I remembered that the aforementioned property isn’t what is meant by a “bit-exact” transform– only that all implementations of the inverse transform are supposed to produce bit-exact output for a given vector of input coefficients.

  Anyway, I tried applying each of these forward transforms. I got slightly differing results, with the latest one I tried (the fdct from libvpx 0.9.5) producing the best results (to my eye). At least the trees look better in the Big Buck Bunny logo image :

  
  
  The dense trees of the Big Buck Bunny logo using one of the libvpx 0.9.0 forward transforms
  
  
  The same segment of the image using the libvpx 0.9.5 forward transform
  

  Then again, it could be that the different numbers generated by the newer forward transform triggered different prediction modes to be chosen. Overall, adapting the newer FDCT did not dramatically improve the encoding quality.

  Working on the intra 4×4 mode encoding is generating some rather more accurate blocks than my intra 16×16 encoder. Pengvado indicated that x264 generates perfectly legible results when forcing the encoder to only use intra 16×16 mode. To be honest, I’m having trouble understanding how that can possibly occur thanks to the Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT). I think that’s where a lot of the error is creeping in with my intra 16×16 encoder. Then again, FFmpeg implements an inverse WHT function that bears ‘vp8′ in its name. This implies that it’s custom to the algorithm and not exactly shared with H.264.

• ffplay could not load codecs

  27 juin 2012, par thehilmisu

  I have installed angstrom and I have built my own filesystem image containing binaries with full ffmpeg and ffplay support on my embedded device.

  The problem is that while ffplay can play the video it cannot play the audio files such as mp3 or ac3. It says could not open the codecs.

  Is there a solution for this ?