Bink Video

• FourCC: BINK (note that some FourCC lists assert that BINK is a FourCC for general-purpose multimedia containers; however, Bink data is always known to be encapsulated in a custom container format)
• Company: RAD Game Tools
• Samples: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/game-formats/bink/, countless video games

Bink is a video codec that purports to use every video coding technique (DCT, FFT, Wavelet Coding, Vector Quantization, Motion Compensation) under the sun and used in a large number of computer and console games. The video is packaged in custom Bink files.

Each plane is coded separately. The Y plane is always coded first in each frame.

Format

Bitstream is read LSB from 32-bit little-endian words.

Frame is coded as three planes.

Each plane starts with Huffman codebooks: two 4-bit ones, one 8-bit (which really consists of seventeen (16 plus one special) 4-bit codebooks) and four 4-bit ones.

Huffman trees

• 4 bits - huffman tree type. This selects one of the tables 16/32/64/128 bytes long.

first table seems to correspond to raw nibble coding, so the rest of data exists only for types 1-15

• 1 bit - tree type: 1 - small tree, 0 - big tree

For small tree:

• 3 bits - number of leaves in tree
• [number of leaves in tree] x 4 bits - leaves code length?

Big trees are seemed to be generated first by making pairs (i ; i+1) or (i+1; i) depending on bit read and then sorted by using several passes of merge sort; this merge sort also uses bits instead of comparisons to sort that list in some order.

Decoding

Block types

NOTE: This section is incomplete

0

Copy 8x8 block from previous frame to current frame

1

Read secondary block code

(TODO)

1 - 3

Fill 16x16 block with coded byte

6

Fill 8x8 block with coded byte