CNM

• Company: Arxel Tribe
• Extension: cnm
• Samples: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/game-formats/ring-cnm/

CNM is a multimedia format used in the computer game Ring: The Legend of the Nibelungen.

Container format

Container has the following structure:

• magic CNM UNR\0
• header
• frame offsets table (video and audio interleaved, audio offsets are zero when audio is not present)
• frames

Header format (all values are little-endian):

 4 bytes - number of frames
 4 bytes - unknown
 1 byte  - unknown
 4 bytes - image width
 4 bytes - image height
 2 bytes - unknown
 1 byte  - number of audio tracks
 4 bytes - number of video frames?
 4 bytes - number of frames repeated?
 4 bytes - size of offsets table
 152 bytes - always zero?
 when audio is present for each track:
   1 byte  - number of channels
   1 bytes - bits per sample
   4 bytes - audio rate
   10 bytes - unused?

Each frame is prefixed by a byte containing its type. Known frame types:

• 0x41 - audio data
• 0x42 - audio data
• 0x53 - image
• 0x54 - some control marker
• 0x5A - audio data

Audio data is PCM prefixed by 32-bit data size, video frames are reviewed below.

Video compression

Each frame is an independently compressed image (in bottoms-up format) split into tiles. Frame header:

 4 bytes - payload size (not counting the header)
 4 bytes - offset to the colour data
 2 bytes - number of tiles
 2 bytes - tile data size
 4 bytes - width
 4 bytes - height
 4 bytes - unknown
 4 bytes - unknown
 3 bytes - unused?

Colour data may contain either raw tile pixels (32-bit BGR0) or it may be packed. In that case tile data size is set to 4 or 2 and deltas stored right after it. Overall tile restoration algorithm is the following:

 copy 16 bytes (4x1 tile) from the stream
 for (tile = 1; tile < num_tiles; tile++) {
   tile_data[tile] = tile_data[tile - 1];
   bits = get_bits(3) + 1; //the same bit reading as below, bits=8 should not happen
   for (i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
     delta = get_bits(bits);
     if (delta && get_bit())
       delta = -delta;
     tile_data[tile][i] += delta;
   }
 }

Tile control data is compressed using variable amount of bits, bits are stored MSB first. Tile index is read depending on the number of tiles: if it can fit into 10 bits then it's ten bits, if it can fit into 11 bits then it's 11 bits, otherwise it's 12 bits.

Single tile decoding flow:

 if (!getbit()) {
   offset = get_bits(tile_index_bits);
   copy tile data from the colour data using offset*16
 } else { // copy existing tile
   decode motion vector, copy tile to which it points to
   (e.g. -1,0 means previous tile and 0,-1 means top tile)
 }

Motion vector codebook:

 1      -  0,-1
 0100   - -1, 0
 0101   - -1,-1
 0110   -  1,-1
 0111   -  0,-2
 000000 - -2,-3
 000001 -  2,-3
 000010 - -1,-4
 000011 -  1,-4
 000100 - -1,-2
 000101 -  1,-2
 000110 -  0,-3
 000111 -  0,-4
 001000 - -2, 0
 001001 - -2,-1
 001010 -  1,-1
 001011 - -2,-2
 001100 -  2,-2
 001101 - -1,-3
 001110 -  1,-3
 001111 -  0,-5

Actual image may be interlaced, i.e. only half of the lines are decoded.