.bik movies¶

The game's movies are Bink video, revision 1, by RAD Game Tools, which it plays through BINKW32.DLL (Movies). A movie is a header, its audio tracks, an index of its frames, and the frames. formats/bink.zig reads the container; FFmpeg's decoders decode the video and the audio (Platform).

The intro's movies lie in the game's folder, the front end's transitions in its interface folder, and the rest in the disc archives CD1.HOG and CD2.HOG. Every one is revision f, g or i, at 15 frames a second but for four stills at 1: 640 by 480 for the screens and their transitions, 640 by 360 for the 16:9 cinematics, and about 352 by 305 for the briefings. The sound is 22,050 Hz, mono or stereo, or 44,100 Hz stereo, and many have none.

Header¶

Then, for each audio track, a u32 that nothing reads (the most samples a packet decodes to); then, for each, its rate (u16) and its flags (u16: 0x1000 coded by the discrete cosine transform rather than the real Fourier transform, 0x2000 stereo, 0x4000 16-bit samples); then, for each, its id (u32).

Frames¶

The index follows, a u32 for each frame: its offset from the start of the file, with bit 0 set for a key frame, so frames start at even offsets. A frame runs to the next one's offset, the last to the file's end.

A frame holds, for each audio track, a u32 size and a packet of that many bytes, then its video to the frame's end. An audio packet starts with the size its samples decode to, in bytes (u32); one of fewer than 4 bytes holds nothing. The first frame carries more of the sound than its share, so that the sound plays ahead of the pictures.