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Extracting the videos


Brickulator
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Brickulator

It's easy enough to fraps the videos in-game but it'd be nice to get our hands on the original files, wouldn't it? I think it would. And afaik it hasn't been done yet.

 

So I've had a look into the video files and made a little more progress than I have before. 

Using Riffpad I looked through INTRO.SI, which refers to the following videos and their corresponding wavs:

 

legomed.smk 

mindscap.smk

intro.smk

outro.smk

badend.smk

goodend.smk

 

I think the file names are pretty self-explanatory, apart from outro. I'm not sure what that one is, as goodend and badend are presumably the two Polkacide endings, and the credits video is contained in CREDITS.SI.

For anyone who's not familiar with smk (Smacker) files, they are compressed videos designed to be used in games, similar to bik (Bink) files created by the same company. The are usually very easy to play and convert, but I'll get to that in a minute. 

 

After a bit of googling on the extraction of files from riffs, I found a little program called mediaextract (https://github.com/panzi/mediaextract). I wasn't expecting it to work at all, but to my surprise, when I asked it to spit out all the smk files contained in INTRO.SI, it instantly gave me 6 of them. As you can see above, there are 6 smk files in the SI file. The command I used was this, if you want to try it:

mediaextract -f smk INTRO.SI
 

You'll need mediaextract and the SI file to be in the same folder, I just copied it across. You can specify an output folder if you want, if you go to the link I posted above there's a list of all the options you can use.

 

Now, I had already tried a couple of other commands with this and had ended up with hundreds of tiny mpg variations that seemed to be empty, so I wasn't too hopeful about these .smks to start with. But then I noticed that they had much larger filesizes and so must actually contain something. The original filenames did not survive the extraction though, and they were named as follows:

 

INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk

INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk 

INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk

INTRO.SI_00000280.smk

INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk

INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk

 

I can't find those codes in the SI file so I assume they were just generated by the extractor. 

 

I tried to play the files with the RAD program but didn't have any luck. I also tried to convert them into avis but either ended up with blank videos or errors. I did have a look into the files a bit more though, and I found their durations:

 

 

INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk - 24 seconds

INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk - 11 seconds

INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk - 1 minute 44 seconds

INTRO.SI_00000280.smk - 14 seconds

INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk - 1 minute 22 seconds

INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk - 30 seconds

 

This suggests that: 

 

INTRO.SI_01dc0be8.smk = badend.smk

INTRO.SI_002a1846.smk = mindscap.smk

INTRO.SI_023c2956.smk = goodend.smk

INTRO.SI_00000280.smk = legomed.smk

INTRO.SI_00381a50.smk = intro.smk

 

Which leaves INTRO.SI_01772eac.smk as outro.smk. It's only 30 seconds long so it can't be the credits, but just to check I had a look at CREDITS.SI and extracted CREDITS.SI_00002306.smk, which is 3 minutes 33 seconds and corresponds to credits.smk. Interestingly, it appears that only the text from the credits is in this video, and the pictures are separate bmps contained in CREDITS.SI.

 

 

That's as far as I've gotten so far. I think the next step is to locate the other video files - the character profile videos etc - and see if any of those work with RAD. And to see if there are any other extra files that don't match up. I might also try hex editing INTRO.SI to see if I can swap outro.smk with legomed.smk or something to see what it is.

UPDATE

 

The character videos are in INFOMAIN.SI. I also found the underwater video from the lift but I've lost it now :P Also, it's not the most interesting video but I extracted the "You need to put the CD in your computer!" video as well. Still no luck playing anything though.

UPDATE 2

It looks like the mysterious outro.smk is an unused video showing the power brick flying off the top of the information centre.

Edited by Brickulator
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Nice work so far, Brickulator. Maybe this will help open up a path to extracting and identifying everything else. It's weird that those videos aren't playable... maybe they need a really old version of Smacker?

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Brickulator

That's what I thought, I tried an older version but that didn't work either. I'll see if I can find a really old version from around 1997 or something.
 
EDIT: I just tried to get outro.smk to play instead of legomed.smk, which didn't work, so I tried again with mindcap.smk and it still didn't work. Both times it just stayed as a black screen, even after 30 seconds, until I pressed space which loaded the information centre as usual. But I imagine that's only because I'm far from an expert at hex editing.
 
EDIT 2: I found a version history for Smacker here but I'm not sure how useful that is. I can't find a version history of the smk tools program, or any download links apart from the one I found earlier.
 
EDIT 3: After a bit of messing with the files I converted the intro.smk equivalent into a bik file and ended up with 1 minute 44 seconds of this:

intro.jpg

So there is something there. Maybe. I think the most likely explanation for the smks not working properly is that the extractor I found isn't really compatible with these SI files. I haven't been able to get anything usable extracted with it.

EDIT 4: I found the underwater lift thing again, Floor2.smk. Hooray!

 

EDIT 5: After a bit more investigation, I found jamesster's upload of INSTALLS.SMK on youtube and had a look on my own disc. This one plays perfectly which does make me think that the issue must be with the extraction (INSTALLS.SMK is not contained in a .SI file or any kind of archive).

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  • 10 months later...
Cloudstrife987

How do you use mediaextract? I just have a file called "makefile" and another called "gitignore" and a folder called src with C and H files.

The readme does not help at all.

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  • 1 month later...
Brickulator

How do you use mediaextract? I just have a file called "makefile" and another called "gitignore" and a folder called src with C and H files.

The readme does not help at all.

Apologies for the late reply, it looks like the version on github no longer includes the builds. Here is the version I used https://ore.rockraidersunited.org/legacy/mediaextract-2013-01-29_503306.zip

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