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• Cracking Aztec Game Audio

  7 juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  Here’s a mild multimedia-related reverse engineering challenge for you. It’s pretty straightforward for those skilled in the art.

  The Setup
  One side effect of running this ridiculously niche interest blog at the intersection of multimedia, reverse engineering, and game hacking is that people occasionally contact me for assistance on those very matters. So it was when one of my MobyGames peers asked if I can help to extract some music from a game called Aztec Wars. The game consists of 2 discs, each with a music.xbe file that contains multiple tunes and is hundreds of megabytes large.

  
  
  

  That’s all the data I received from the first email. At first I’m wondering what makes people think I have some magical insight into cracking these formats with such little information. Ordinarily, I would need to have the entire data file to work with and possibly the game binaries. But I didn’t want to ask him to upload hundreds of megabytes of data and I didn’t feel like downloading it ; commitment issues and all.

  But then I gathered a little confidence and remembered that the .xbe files are probably just Game Resource Archive Formats (GRAF) which are, traditionally, absurdly simple. I asked my colleague to send me a hexdump of the first kilobyte of one of the .xbe GRAFs ('hexdump -C -n 1024 music.xbe > file') as well as the total file size of the GRAF.

  The Hexdump
  The first music.xbe file is 192817376 bytes large. These are the first 1024 144 bytes (more than enough) :

  00000000  01 00 00 00 60 04 00 00  14 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |....`...........|
  00000010  0d 00 00 00 48 00 00 00  94 39 63 01 1c a4 21 03  |....H....9c..¤ !.|
  00000020  7a d2 54 04 04 28 ad 05  d8 88 fd 06 d8 88 fd 06  |zÒT..(­.Ø.ý.Ø.ý.|
  00000030  2a 6e 46 08 2a 6e 46 08  2a 6e 46 08 2a 6e 46 08  |*nF.*nF.*nF.*nF.|
  00000040  50 13 2f 0a e0 28 7e 0b  52 49 46 46 44 39 63 01  |P./.à( .RIFFD9c.|
  00000050  57 41 56 45 66 6d 74 20  10 00 00 00 01 00 02 00  |WAVEfmt ........|
  00000060  44 ac 00 00 10 b1 02 00  04 00 10 00 64 61 74 61  |D¬...±......data|
  00000070  fc 13 63 01 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |ü.c.............|
  00000080  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
  

  The Challenge
  Armed with only the information in the foregoing section, figure out a method for extracting all the audio files in that file and advise on their playback/conversion. Ideally, this method should require minimal effort from both you and the person on the other end of the conversation.

  The Resolution
  The reason I ask is because I came up with a solution but knew, deep down, that there must be a slightly easier way. How would you solve this ?

  The music files in question are now preserved on YouTube (until they see fit to remove them for one reason or another).

• New Challenges

  14 mars 2013, par silvia

  I finished up at Google last week and am now working at NICTA, an Australian ICT research institute.

  My work with Google was exciting and I learned a lot. I like to think that Google also got a lot out of me – I coded and contributed to some YouTube caption features, I worked on Chrome captions and video controls, and above all I worked on video accessibility for HTML at the W3C.

  I was one of the key authors of the W3C Media Accessibility Requirements document that we created in the Media Accessibility Task Force of the W3C HTML WG. I then went on to help make video accessibility a reality. We created WebVTT and the <track> element and applied it to captions, subtitles, chapters (navigation), video descriptions, and metadata. To satisfy the need for synchronisation of video with other media resources such as sign language video or audio descriptions, we got the MediaController object and the @mediagroup attribute.

  I must say it was a most rewarding time. I learned a lot about being productive at Google, collaborate successfully over the distance, about how the WebKit community works, and about the new way of writing W3C standard (which is more like pseudo-code). As one consequence, I am now a co-editor of the W3C HTML spec and it seems I am also about to become the editor of the WebVTT spec.

  At NICTA my new focus of work is WebRTC. There is both a bit of research and a whole bunch of application development involved. I may even get to do some WebKit development, if we identify any issues with the current implementation. I started a week ago and am already amazed by the amount of work going on in the WebRTC space and the amazing number of open source projects playing around with it. Video conferencing is a new challenge and I look forward to it.

• Where to find ffserver static for linux

  29 mai 2013, par sajad

  I need just to download ffserver static file for using in linux(ubuntu 12.04 x64), with libx264 library. I don't want to challenge compilation task on Linux and have just a portable static file. I have spent long time searching for that. Can anybody guide me ?