Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (8563)

• Who Invented FLIC ?

  26 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Multimedia History

  I have been reading through “All Your Base Are Belong To Us : How 50 Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture” by Harold Goldberg. Despite the title, Zero Wing has yet to be mentioned (I’m about halfway done).

  
  
  

  I just made it through the chapter describing early breakthrough CD-ROM games, including Myst, The 7th Guest, and The 11th Hour. Some interesting tidbits :

  The 7th Guest
  Of course, Graeme Devine created a new FMV format (called VDX, documented here) for The 7th Guest. The player was apparently called PLAY and the book claims that Autodesk was so impressed by the technology that it licensed the player for use in its own products. When I think of an Autodesk multimedia format, I think of FLIC. The VDX coding format doesn’t look too much like FLIC, per my reading.

  Here’s the relevant passage (pp 118-119) :

  Devine began working on creating software within the CD-ROM disk that would play full-motion video. Within days he had a robust but small ninety-kilobyte player called PLAY that was so good, it was licensed by Autodesk, the makers of the best 3-D animation program at the time. Then Devine figured out a way to compress the huge video files so that they would easily fit on two CD-ROMs.

  Googling for “autodesk trilobyte play program” (Trilobyte was the company behind 7th Guest) led me to this readme file for a program called PLAY73 (hosted at Jason Scott’s massive CD-ROM archive, and it’s on a disc that, incidentally, I donated to the archive ; so, let’s here it for Jason’s tireless archival efforts ! And for Google’s remarkable indexing prowess). The file — dated September 10, 1991 — mentions that it’s a FLICK player, copyright Trilobyte software.

  
  
  

  However, it also mentions being a Groovie Player. Based on ScummVM’s reimplementation of the VDX format, Groovie might refer to the engine behind The 7th Guest.

  So now I’m really interested : Did Graeme Devine create the FLIC file format ? Multimedia nerds want to know !

  I guess not. Thanks to Jim Leonard for digging up this item : “I developed the flic file format for the Autodesk Animator.” Jim Kent, Dr. Dobbs Magazine, March 1993.

  The PLAY73 changelog reveals something from the bad old days of DOS/PC programming : The necessity of writing graphics drivers for 1/2 dozen different video adapters. The PLAY73 readme file also has some vintage contact address for Graeme Devine ; remember when addresses looked like these ?

  If you have any comments, please send them to :
  	Compuserve : 72330,3276
  	Genie : G.DEVINE
  	Internet : 72330,3276@compuserve.com
  

  The 11th Hour
  The book didn’t really add anything I didn’t already know regarding the compression format (RoQ) used in 11th Hour. I already knew how hard Devine worked at it. This book took pains to emphasize the emotional toll taken on the format’s creator.

  I wonder if he would be comforted to know that, more than 15 years later, people are still finding ways to use the format.

• Wave Goodbye ; What About VP8/WebM ?

  7 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Multimedia PressWatch

  Some big news in the geek community this past week came in the form of Google’s announcement that it would no longer be caring about its vaunted Wave technology. I was mildly heartbroken by this since I had honestly wanted to try Google Wave. Then I remembered why I never got a chance to try it : they made it an exclusive club at the beginning. I really did try to glean some utility out of the concept by reading documentation and watching videos and I had some ideas about how I might apply it. Then again, I try to think of a use for nearly any technology that crosses my path.

  It still struck me as odd : Why would Google claim that no one was interested in their platform when they wouldn’t give anyone a chance to try it out ? A little digging reveals that Google did open it for general use back around May 18. That date sounds familiar... oh yeah, VP8 was open sourced right around the same time. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember hearing anything about Wave at the time.

  But now I’m wondering about VP8 and WebM. How long do you think it might be before Google loses interest in these initiatives as well and reassigns their engineering resources ? Fortunately, if they did do that, the technology would live on thanks to the efforts of FFmpeg developers. A multimedia format has a far more clear-cut use case than Google Wave.

• Revision 29188 : 2 options de plus pour personnaliser la page d’activation de la mutu : * ...

  15 juin 2009, par real3t@… — Log

  2 options de plus pour personnaliser la page d’activation de la mutu :
  * ’branding’ : texte libre en HTML
  * ’branding_logo’ => logo (sous forme de HTML)