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• Subtitling Sierra RBT Files

  2 juin 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  This is part 2 of the adventure started in my Subtitling Sierra VMD Files post. After I completed the VMD subtitling, The Translator discovered a wealth of animation files in a format called RBT (this apparently stands for “Robot” but I think “Ribbit” format could be more fun). What are we going to do ? We had come so far by solving the VMD subtitling problem for Phantasmagoria. It would be a shame if the effort ground to a halt due to this.

  Fortunately, the folks behind the ScummVM project already figured out enough of the format to be able to decode the RBT files in Phantasmagoria.

  In the end, I was successful in creating a completely standalone tool that can take a Robot file and a subtitle file and create a new Robot file with subtitles. The source code is here (subtitle-rbt.c). Here’s what the final result looks like :

  
  
  “What’s in the refrigerator ?” I should note at this juncture that I am not sure if this particular Robot file even has sound or dialogue since I was conducting these experiments on a computer with non-working audio.
  

  The RBT Format
  I have created a new MultimediaWiki page describing the Robot Animation format based on the ScummVM source code. I have not worked with a format quite like this before. These are paletted animations which consist of a sequence of independent frames that are designed to be overlaid on top of static background. Because of these characteristics, each frame encodes its own unique dimensions and origin coordinate within the frame. While the Phantasmagoria VMD files are usually 288×144 (which are usually double-sized for the benefit of a 640×400 Super VGA canvas), these frames are meant to be plotted on a game field that was roughly 576×288 (288×144 doublesized).
  

  For example, 2 minimalist animation frames from a desk investigation Robot file :

  
  
  100×147

  
  101×149
  

  As for compression, my first impression was that the algorithm was the same as VMD. This is wrong. It evidently uses an unmodified version of a standard algorithm called Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS). It shows up in several RFCs and was apparently used in MS-DOS’s transparent disk compression scheme.

  Approach
  Thankfully, many of the lessons I learned from the previous project are applicable to this project, including : subtitle library interfacing, subtitling in the paletted colorspace, and replacing encoded frames from the original file instead of trying to create a new file.

  Here is the pitch for this project :

  • Create a C program that can traverse through an input file, piece by piece, and generate an output file. The result of this should be a bitwise identical file.
  • Adapt the LZS compression decoding algorithm from ScummVM into the new tool. Make the tool dump raw Portable NetMap (PNM) files of varying dimensions and ensure that they look correct.
  • Compress using LZS.
  • Stretch the frames and draw subtitles.
  • More compression. Find the minimum window for each frame.

  Compression
  Normally, my first goal is to decompress the video and store the data in a raw form. However, this turned out to be mathematically intractable. While the format does support both compressed and uncompressed frames (even though ScummVM indicates that the uncompressed path is yet unexercised), the goal of this project requires making the frames so large that they overflow certain parameters of the file.

  A Robot file has a sequence of frames and 2 tables describing the size of each frame. One table describes the entire frame size (audio + video) while the second table describes just the video frame size. Since these tables only use 16 bits to specify a size, the maximum frame size is 65536 bytes. Leaving space for the audio portion of the frame, this only leaves a per-frame byte budget of about 63000 bytes for the video. Expanding the frame to 576×288 (165,888 pixels) would overflow this limit.

  Anyway, the upshot is that I needed to compress the data up front.

  Fortunately, the LZS compressor is pretty straightforward, at least if you have experience writing VLC-oriented codecs. While the algorithm revolves around back references, my approach was to essentially write an RLE encoder. My compressor would search for runs of data (plentiful when I started to stretch the frame for subtitling purposes). When a run length of n=3 or more of the same pixel is found, encode the pixel by itself, and then store a back reference of offset -1 and length (n-1). It took a little while to iron out a few problems, but I eventually got it to work perfectly.

  I have to say, however, that the format is a little bit weird in how it codes very large numbers. The length encoding is somewhat Golomb-like, i.e., smaller values are encoded with fewer bits. However, when it gets to large numbers, it starts encoding counts of 15 as blocks of 1111. For example, 24 is bigger than 7. Thus, emit 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 8 from 23 -> 16. Still bigger than 15, so stuff another 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 15. Now we’re at 1, so stuff 0001. So 24 is 11111111 0001. 12 bits is not too horrible. But the total number of bytes (value / 30). So a value of 300 takes around 10 bytes (80 bits) to encode.

  Palette Slices
  As in the VMD subtitling project, I took the subtitle color offered in the subtitle spec file as a suggestion and used Euclidean distance to match to the closest available color in the palette. One problem, however, is that the palette is a lot smaller in these animations. According to my notes, for the set of animations I scanned, only about 80 colors were specified, starting at palette index 55. I hypothesize that different slices of the palette are reserved for different uses. E.g., animation, background, and user interface. Thus, there is a smaller number of colors to draw upon for subtitling purposes.

  Scaling
  One bit of residual weirdness in this format is the presence of a per-frame scale factor. While most frames set this to 100 (100% scale), I have observed 70%, 80%, and 90%. ScummVM is a bit unsure about how to handle these, so I am as well. However, I eventually realized I didn’t really need to care, at least not when decoding and re-encoding the frame. Just preserve the scale factor. I intend to modify the tool further to take scale factor into account when creating the subtitle.

  The Final Resolution
  Right around the time that I was composing this post, The Translator emailed me and notified me that he had found a better way to subtitle the Robot files by modifying the scripts, rendering my entire approach moot. The result is much cleaner :

  
  
  Turns out that the engine supported subtitles all along
  

  It’s a good thing that I enjoyed the challenge or I might be annoyed at this point.

  See Also

  • Subtitling Sierra VMD Files : My effort to subtitle the main FMV files found in Sierra games.

  The post Subtitling Sierra RBT Files first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• Copy frame specific properties (eg. width and height)

  5 août 2014, par gkuczera

  It’s not that something is not working, I just can’t figure out how to copy frame props (eg. height and width) after usage of sws_scale function - this function doesn’t copy them into the destination frame).

  Why I need this ? My frame after scaling is becoming the input for the filter, and it’s source props have to be specified to specific numbers, not like it accepts everything (so a frame with width and height equal to zero - which I get after scaling - is not an option).

  I tried to use

  av_frame_copy_props

  but even in this function’s description, they mentioned that it will not do this.

  Here is the code :

  AVFrame* tOwnersFrame = pOwner->getFrame();
  
  AVFrame* tResizedFrame = avcodec_alloc_frame();
  
  int tResizedFrameWidth = pMaxFrameWidth;
  
  int tResizedFrameHeight = pMaxFrameHeight;
  
  
  
  if (!tResizedFrame)
  
  {
  
      cout << "Couldn't allocate the frame!" << endl;
  
      return;
  
  }
  
  
  
  uint8_t* tBuffer;
  
  int tBytesNeeded;
  
  
  
  tBytesNeeded = avpicture_get_size(PIX_FMT_RGB24, tResizedFrameWidth, tResizedFrameHeight);
  
  tBuffer = (uint8_t*)av_malloc(tBytesNeeded * sizeof(uint8_t));
  
  avpicture_fill((AVPicture*)tResizedFrame, tBuffer, PIX_FMT_RGB24, tResizedFrameWidth, tResizedFrameHeight);
  
  
  
  mSwsContext = sws_getCachedContext(mSwsContext, pOwner->getFrameWidth(), pOwner->getFrameHeight(), AV_PIX_FMT_BGR24, tResizedFrameWidth, tResizedFrameHeight, PIX_FMT_RGB24, SWS_BILINEAR, NULL, NULL, NULL);
  
  sws_scale(mSwsContext, (const uint8_t* const *)tOwnersFrame->data, tOwnersFrame->linesize, 0, pOwner->getFrameHeight(), tResizedFrame->data, tResizedFrame->linesize);
  
  cout << "FramesMerger::resizeFrameMax - arg frame size: " << pOwner->getFrame()->width << ", " << pOwner->getFrame()->height << endl;
  
  cout << "FramesMerger::resizeFrameMax - resized frame size: " << tResizedFrame->width << ", " << tResizedFrame->height << endl;

• vc-1 : Optimise parser (with special attention to ARM)

  21 juillet 2014, par Ben Avison

  vc-1 : Optimise parser (with special attention to ARM)
  The previous implementation of the parser made four passes over each input
  
  buffer (reduced to two if the container format already guaranteed the input
  
  buffer corresponded to frames, such as with MKV). But these buffers are
  
  often 200K in size, certainly enough to flush the data out of L1 cache, and
  
  for many CPUs, all the way out to main memory. The passes were :
  1) locate frame boundaries (not needed for MKV etc)
  
  2) copy the data into a contiguous block (not needed for MKV etc)
  
  3) locate the start codes within each frame
  
  4) unescape the data between start codes
  After this, the unescaped data was parsed to extract certain header fields,
  
  but because the unescape operation was so large, this was usually also
  
  effectively operating on uncached memory. Most of the unescaped data was
  
  simply thrown away and never processed further. Only step 2 - because it
  
  used memcpy - was using prefetch, making things even worse.
  This patch reorganises these steps so that, aside from the copying, the
  
  operations are performed in parallel, maximising cache utilisation. No more
  
  than the worst-case number of bytes needed for header parsing is unescaped.
  
  Most of the data is, in practice, only read in order to search for a start
  
  code, for which optimised implementations already existed in the H264 codec
  
  (notably the ARM version uses prefetch, so we end up doing both remaining
  
  passes at maximum speed). For MKV files, we know when we’ve found the last
  
  start code of interest in a given frame, so we are able to avoid doing even
  
  that one remaining pass for most of the buffer.
  In some use-cases (such as the Raspberry Pi) video decode is handled by the
  
  GPU, but the entire elementary stream is still fed through the parser to
  
  pick out certain elements of the header which are necessary to manage the
  
  decode process. As you might expect, in these cases, the performance of the
  
  parser is significant.
  To measure parser performance, I used the same VC-1 elementary stream in
  
  either an MPEG-2 transport stream or a MKV file, and fed it through avconv
  
  with -c:v copy -c:a copy -f null. These are the gperftools counts for
  
  those streams, both filtered to only include vc1_parse() and its callees,
  
  and unfiltered (to include the whole binary). Lower numbers are better :
                  Before          After
  
  File  Filtered  Mean   StdDev   Mean   StdDev  Confidence  Change
  
  M2TS  No        861.7  8.2      650.5  8.1     100.0%      +32.5%
  
  MKV   No        868.9  7.4      731.7  9.0     100.0%      +18.8%
  
  M2TS  Yes       250.0  11.2     27.2   3.4     100.0%      +817.9%
  
  MKV   Yes       149.0  12.8     1.7    0.8     100.0%      +8526.3%
  Yes, that last case shows vc1_parse() running 86 times faster ! The M2TS
  
  case does show a larger absolute improvement though, since it was worse
  
  to begin with.
  This patch has been tested with the FATE suite (albeit on x86 for speed).
  Signed-off-by : Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org>
  

  • [DBH] libavcodec/vc1_parser.c