[callahan]

I went back to an old project today, trying to pull the Irix demo videos (as seen in the cool space tour video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srRquWes0BQ) off of my Indigo. The Indigo (R3K, elan) has a base 4.0.5 install to a SCSI2SD. I had given up a while ago because the EFS file system is a pain I didn't want to network the machine at the moment.

Today I finally realized I could just dd the SD image (for partition 7, if anyone comes looking) from the SD card to a file and use efs2tar to extract the whole filesystem. It worked. (If anyone wants the tarball of the R3K Irix 4.0.5 install, just let me know -- it's only 130MB uncompressed).

What I now have are the videos, filenames of "hospital.MOVIE", "indigo.MOVIE", etc. VLC can't figure out the codec, which for me is about as dead-end as it gets. It does pull the audio, but not at a consistently right speed.

I've attached a screen clipping of the header of one of the files in HxD. Anyone have an idea of any modern tool I can use to open this and possibly convert them to modern file format? Would be a shame for them to otherwise be lost. Especially the Indigo video -- I used to drool over that long before I had an SGI of my own.

[Raion]

I'll take both the image and EFS of them. You can use mega.nz or something like it to upload it and then just DM me the link. I'll put it up.

That header looks... strange. Dunno what that is right there, but it may be SGI proprietary. Failing all, you could always use the analog hole, as we call it, to externally record the videos?

[weblacky]

MOVI claims : http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/SGI_movie

SGI Movie..it's a thing and they also claim FFMPEG understands it. Try to transcode it!

[vishnu]

I'm not sure about conversion but Mark Podlipec's Xanim should be able to play those movies...

[jpstewart]

On Linux, mplayer plays them just fine and reports:

Code:

Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
libavcodec version 58.91.100 (external)
Selected video codec: [ffmvc1] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg SGI Motion Video Compressor 1)

So weblacky is correct about ffmpeg understanding the format!

[callahan]

@jpstewart -- Does the audio sync properly for you? For me the Indigo audio is sped up quite a bit so it loses sync with the video (and is too high-pitched).

Edit: The audio is definitely ~exactly twice as fast it should be. So I presume the ffmpeg decoder is reading the wrong bitrate. Below is what mplayer reports for the audio stream for me:

Code:

Opening audio decoder: [pcm] Uncompressed PCM audio decoder
AUDIO: 22050 Hz, 2 ch, s16be, 705.6 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 88200->88200)
Selected audio codec: [pcm] afm: pcm (Uncompressed PCM)

[jpstewart]

You're right, the audio is too fast.  (I didn't have my speakers turned on the first time I tried it.  I had only checked video playback.)  I get the same output as you do, but below that I see:

Code:

==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16be (2 bytes per sample)

So I'm not sure if the problem is that mplayer is mis-detecting the input rate or if it is simply outputting the 22050 Hz stream at 48000 Hz.  I think it's an output problem.  Hitting the { key in mplayer will halve the audio output rate and that makes it sound right (or close to it).

[jpstewart]

Ok, I think I see what's going on. It looks like mplayer (or, probably libavformat) is misinterpreting the audio rate in the .movie file. I'll need a little time to try things out, but I think I've got a quick-and-dirty workaround. It might also be possible to patch library, too.

[callahan]

@JPStewart -- thanks in advance!

@Raion -- Given the potential historical interest, I uploaded the files to the internet archive here: https://archive.org/details/indigo-irix-...tition.-7z

[Raion]

Thank you. I'll grab them when I'm back from vacation and put them up.