How to open binary file with unknown structure?

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Hello!

I need to know about inner structure of particular file. File format is ".lip" and this is some kind of facial animation \ lip-sync file. I need to be able to generate such files by myself. I have tried to parse their binary structure by myself but I haven't any clue how they are organized.

As the lip-sync files, I have tha conjecture that they could have structure such as:

[header]
[frame][phoneme/anim]
[frame][phoneme/anim]
etc...

Here is the link to the archive with 3 of these files as example.

http://rapidshare.com/files/452013633/20110311_20_09.rar[^]

Can anyone give me any clue or some help on this problem?

Best regards, Anry.

Posted 10-Mar-11 23:17pm

Anruin

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2 solutions

Solution 2

Before doing this, you should make sure that you can *legally* reverse engineer their data file.

Posted 11-Mar-11 0:19am

#realJSOP

Comments

Albin Abel 11-Mar-11 8:26am

This is an important point. My 5

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 11-Mar-11 13:04pm

Excuse John, do you know a single legislation against reverse engineering (not anything related by only this)?
--SA

#realJSOP 11-Mar-11 13:40pm

It's usually included in the EULA for the application. I'm just saying that one should proceed cautiously, that's all.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 11-Mar-11 22:00pm

Agree. EULA often violates the law as I know, I've read that reverse engineering is always allowed by the law (withing the purpose of using the product, not for competition or making money of it and the like) which takes precedence over EULA. However, real-life legal practice... sigh...
--SA

#realJSOP 12-Mar-11 10:29am

We don't know why he wants to do this though, and is the only reason I mentioned it. An abundance of caution is always preferable to a wild-ass-guess. :)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 12-Mar-11 17:48pm

Well, who would argue..?
I like the similar one: "Even a paranoid can have enemies".
--SA

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OriginalGriff · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-11T00:05:00

If you aren't sure about the contents of a file with a particular extension, then try google: ".LIP file extension".

In this case it isn't clear what the heck it is, which is revealing: your file is not a common format, so it is likely to be proprietary and documentation may be difficult to find.

If as you say this is a binary file, and you cannot understand it, then your best bet is to talk to the people who wrote the software that produced it: they may be helpful, but they are the only people who I can guarantee will know about the file format!

BTW: There is not a lot of point in posting compressed archived here: very, very few people will download and open anonymous zip archives from unknown people. You will also find that Rapidshare has a reputation for hosting not-safe-for-work or downright illegal content, and is banned by many work firewalls.

"This files used by game TES IV: Oblivion and can be generated through it's editor. Developers saying nothing about it. Generation of them using game's editor along with audio files recording is not handy, so it is idea why I have decided to create such a program.
Thanks for advice about archives posting, Rapidshare and all this stuff, I am new here and I do not know all the rules and accepted standards yet :)"

Ah! Oblivion: a good game! I finished it a few times on my 360...

When you have more info, feed that into Google as well: "oblivion LIP files" gives interesting results: Google[^]

From what I can see, the LIP file coordinates the text and sound to generate phonemes for the lipsynch: complicated stuff! If you can't find how to do it for Oblivion, it appears that the same files are used by Fallout, so you may have more luck there.

Basically, I think you are on your own: the number of people world-wide playing with this stuff is going to be small, and the format is likely to reference information in other parts of the code / data files. It is probably a long job to work it out from scratch! The other option is to raise the subject on a dedicated Oblivion/Fallout mod site (if there are any, I haven't looked).

Good Luck!