Reading up about xanmovie, and having recently (as of a few months ago) acquired a copy of Wing Commander IV, I was intrigued by claims that, though a normal AVI file, WC3/4 movies could only be played by a special file.Installing the Win95 patch for WC4, I noticed the addition of the xanlib.dll file. Looking at it with a text editor exposed some interesting-looking lines at the end. I reasoned that it was possible that Xan was implemented as a standard Windows AVI codec, which means it wouldn't be terribly hard to add support for it to standard Windows Media Player.At first, I thought I'd need to do some heavy hacking with the files. I began by disassembling the code, exporting symbol tables, and other programming activities, researching the interface to xanlib.dll. Before actually writing any code, though, I decided to try something stupid: just add xanlib.dll as a video codec.Well, it worked.My initial experiment, hacking the registry under Windows 2000, was a remarkable success. However, trying to apply it to Win98SE, things didn't work as I expected. After a few minutes of reflection, I hit upon the solution.You need to add the following line under the [drivers32] section in the system.ini (in C:\Windows). It's simple text file that I'm sure many frustrated Windows users were familiar with, before the advent of Win95 and friends.vidc.XXAN=xanlib.dllYou also need to copy xanlib.dll into the C:\Windows\System directory, so Windows can find it.Now there's a XXAN decoder available for decoding movies with XXAN compression (the Wing Commander 3/4 movies!), and normal Windows Media Player (I used version 7) can play it.I tried this out with the hidden Wilford scene available from the CIC (hidden3.zip) and it worked beautifully. The only problem? No sound. I believe the audio is just encoded as regular PCM, so it's a real mystery why it can't read it. I'm going to do some research into the AVI file format, and maybe turn up an answer.Until then, it's a start. Also, since XXAN is used as a standard decompressor, it might open the possibility of reconverting it into another format using standard video editting software.
