The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Okay, so I managed to make an image of the 3DO SCII disk and rip all the files to my HD.  Now.. Does anyone know how to work with the .DUK file format? it's obviously the FMV format that was used, but I can't seem to find any sort of reference as to how to either play nor manipulate/convert them.  Any ideas?


Arcain.

In August 2002, when the project was getting started on SourceForge, I tried to help with the 3DO specific stuff as much as possible.   I did a lot of research on this .duk movie format.  The codec was the first major codec made by The Duck Corporation (http://www.duck.com), which now owns or is owned by On2 Technologies (http://www.on2.com/index.php3).  It was the predecessor to the TrueMotion codec used on the Saturn and Dreamcast.  Someone who went by the name of moo_ in the IRC channel wrote an email to the Duck Corporation and got a response from Dan Miller, CTO and founder of Duck/On2.  He forwarded it to the sc2-devel mailing list:

Fw: Duck codecs Was: Open Source? (fwd)   (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1000941&forum_id=11458)
2002-08-22 19:05

I believe the current plan for extracting the videos from their .duk cages is to A) use a video capture card to record the analog input from a 3DO or B) somehow make use of the upcoming 3DO emulator FreeDO (http://www.freedo.org) to convert the video.

ooooooooooookay... I mean, I knew SOMEONE must have looked into it already, but I didn't know we actually found anyone who had the source...

I do have a video capture card (several really) and can easily turn these into another format...   Doesn't look like Vorbis has their video compression software up yet.  Is there another free/GPL format we can use?  I'll look around and see what's out there.

Arcain.

Here's one.. XVID.

http://www.xvid.org/

Apparently this is a GPL DIVX.  I'm going to take a look around there and see if I can find a codec or something.  Although, it appears they have little more than source code, and I'f affraid my programming skills aer limited to Basic and some Assembly on the Atari 800XL, which I seriously doubt would be of any use in this particular case.  Or any case for that matter.  :-[

Arcain

Found compiled Xvid Codecs here: http://nic.dnsalias.com/ among other places.  Haven't tried it yet, but will see what I can do with it today.

Nemt: Already covered.  I've had a 3DO for some years now, and it still sits by my desk with SCII loaded and ready.

So, there it is.

Arcain.

The problems with the .duk format are of a somewhat different nature now.

Capturing the output from the 3DO is very easy, and in fact is has been done long before this project was started (they can be downloaded from the Pages of Now and Forever). But we would want the videos
to be in as good a quality as possible. Reverse engineering the .duk format is not impossible; in fact, I'm already able to extract the audio (the easy part). It was stored in a variation of adpcm and I've put an extractor tool in cvs.
What we could do is re-encode the format to something like divx, or make a player for the original .duk files.
The latter would yield better videos, as the .DUK format uses lossy compression. We could make it an option, but there's another, more serious problem: TFB doesn't own the videos.

Oh crud.....

Well that's not good.. Uhm... I suppose I could make some new ones if no-one minds.  I can try to get them as accurate as possible.  There are a number of pre-existing models at SC3D in Max format.  I have max, but I'm not well versed in it.  Much prefer Truespace myself just for the interface.

I'm sure we have enough people here with 3D experience that we can make some new animations.  I don't know if we would have to change the script or not (would they really be that anal?) but the music, speach and animation can all be redone reasonably fast and with far superior quality this time.

Lemme know what you think.

Arcain.

I just have found a .DUK Player in my old DOS 6.22 Directory...
It works perfectly (not tested on SC2 though) but only in a DosBox...

If someone wants it... Just tell me ;)

I doubt it's the same .duk format it plays. But I'm still curious. Could you send it to svdb at stack.nl?

Do any of you long time SC2 sceners remember Tsing ?

If you want rendering done, I reckon he is the man for the job.
Unfortunately I dont have any current contact info for him, save his website, which hasnt been updated in a year.

Heres a sample of his work, it rocks.

http://www.sa-matra.net/movies/matramovie.zip

His site is http://www.sa-matra.net

What, not even a "Cool animation J!"
?

I took a look at the video clip you linked to. I reckon you're right. Does anybody around here know how to contact Tsing?

E-mail me and I'll send you his e-mail address.

tsing is daily in sb forums and sometimes on #starcontrol

anyway, can you upload the DUK movies?

Did anything ever happen with this?

Yes, see http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/index.php?title=The_Ur-Quan_Masters_Technical_FAQ#How_do_I_use_the_3DO_intro_and_victory_movies_in_the_game.3F

Was anyone still doing a Creative Commons/free/whatever version of the intro and ending?

The PC slides are the default in CVS if memory serves.  They are the same license as other SC2 images.