Metal Gear Solid VP3

• Extension: none (extracted from a game resource file)
• Company: Silicon Knights
• Samples: http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/game-formats/mgs1-vp3/

The GameCube version of Konami's Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, developed by Silicon Knights, uses files that are suspected to contain VP3 video data.

File Format

All multi-byte numbers are big-endian. The file header is as follows:

bytes 0-3    total size of file (number is too long?)
bytes 4-19   unknown
bytes 20-23  video width in pixels
bytes 24-27  video height in pixels
bytes 28-35  unknown
bytes 36-29  possibly the frame rate (18 fps?)
bytes 40-43  video codec FourCC ('13PV', VP31 spelled backwards)
bytes 44-63  unknown

Following the header is data that appears to conform to the VP3 video coding method. It is unknown how the frame data is delimited. VP3 makes no provision for encoding frame length in the bitstream. It's possible that the demuxer and the video decoder in the game are one and the same and that the video decoder parses through data until it has finished a frame and then resets on a byte boundary (or perhaps a multi-byte boundary) to decode the next frame.