Can anyone tell me how to read an .av file?

[4_Legs_Good]

I just got hold of an old DOS CD game that has video clips on it. I'm really only after the clips. There's a folder on the disc that is called "movies" and in it there are a bunch of XXXX.av files (not .avi). I've tried simply opening them in Premiere or Windows Media, but no luck. If I change the extension to .mpg, they'll play some tinny crazy audio, but nothing intelligable.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to view these things in Windows or (preferably) convert them to .avi or .mpeg files?

I really need to get these things, and I don't wanna have to play the game to get 'em

Thanks

David

[foxyshadis]

Did you try playing them in mplayer? (With the original extension.) If it doesn't work, a codec probably doesn't exist. You'll have to post one if you want anyone to figure out what it might be, though.

[setarip_old]

What is the title of the game?

[4_Legs_Good]

The game is Interplay's The Lord of the Rings CD-ROM version. The original DOS version I don't think has the video clips.

Here's a link to a 2MB or so .av file.

http://www.paintedmotion.com/LotR/SADF.AV
Any help would be appeciated! Thanks for the responses so far!

david

[setarip_old]

I just got hold of an old DOS CD game that has video clips on it.The original DOS version I don't think has the video clips.Huh???

[4_Legs_Good]

Huh???

Sorry. Not quite clear.

It was originally released on floppies and didn't have video clips. That version you can find downloadable on the web.

They re-issued it a couple years later on CD-ROM and that version *did* include video clips.

Hope that makes more sense.

david

[setarip_old]

It looks like it's a custom format, with no discernible header...

(BTW - Good looking family ;>} )

[4_Legs_Good]

It looks like it's a custom format, with no discernible header...

(BTW - Good looking family ;>} )

Doh! That's what I was afraid of.

And thanks! ;)

david

[stegre]

Indeed obscure. Not even listed in places that specifically describe A/V formats specifically used Interplay (http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Category:Game_Formats). Perhaps you could send email to "Scott Bennie" or "Mark Whittlesey" (apparently the producer/designer and "CD-ROM format adapter" for that game specifically, listed under Net Resources here (http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/lotr1.html).

But I did reverse engineer it a bit. After header section of some sort, it appears to be chunks of 11,025Hz unsigned 8-bit mono PCM audio interspersed with video frames of some undetermined format, to be played 15 FPS. I determined this after noticing sections which had the look of 8-bit mono PCM, namely single byte values that steadily increase and subsequently decrease in some discernable pattern. So I loaded the whole file into wave editor, telling to consider the whole file 8-bit mono PCM. I then put set the editor's display to "frequency spectrum" mode and sure enough there were large chunks of "white noise" (these were video sections being interpreted as audio) interspersed with slices with a "normal" looking audio spectrum (see screenshot below). The apparent audio sections were around 735 bytes each - a 1 byte/sample for mono 8-bit PCM that's exactly 1/15 of a second.

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/misc/sadf.av.png

And I did manage to "prove" my analysis to the extent I've described above by creating a wav file of the audio from the first 10 seconds of your test file. Using the wav editor, I manually highlighted and deleted (a somewhat inaccurate and highly tedious task, if only because I had to do that 150 times to get the just 10 secs - so that's about as much as I'm doin! ;) Not that this all solves your problem, or anything, as "demuxing" the audio that way is, as I say, crude, and more importantly I really don't have any idea how to interpret the video.

But, FYI, here's the first 10 secs of your audio (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/misc/SADF1.wav), reconstructed and with the proper wav header so you can hear it.

[4_Legs_Good]

Wow Stegre!:thanks:

That's really an amazing amount of work you did, and very helpful. I can't believe the reconstruction you did on the audio, Very impressive.

Thanks also for the link. I'll probably try to write to the developers and see if I can't weasel out a reader or at least some more information on the files.

Thanks again!!!

david