Smacker video
Encyclopedia
Smacker video is a video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

 file format
File format
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...

 (with the .SMK file extension
Filename extension
A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file applied to indicate the encoding of its contents or usage....

) developed by RAD Game Tools
RAD Game Tools
RAD Game Tools is privately held company owned by Jeff Roberts and Mitch Soule based in Kirkland, Washington that develops video and computer game software technologies which are licensed primarily by video game companies. RAD Game Tools is somewhat unusual among middleware companies as they...

 and has been used in computer games
Personal computer game
A PC game, also known as a computer game, is a video game played on a personal computer, rather than on a video game console or arcade machine...

. Smacker video supports 256 colors, and includes transparency support. While being a palette-based format, which is inherently limited to having not more than 256 colors in each frame, Smacker videos may still contain more colors in total due to "palette rotation" whereby the next frame may have a different palette. This usually results in SMK files that look better if the source video has more than 256 colors. RAD's format for video at higher color depths is Bink Video
Bink video
Bink is a proprietary video file format developed by RAD Game Tools and used primarily in computer games. It has been used in many games for Windows, Mac OS, Xbox 360, Xbox, GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP...

.

The compression rate of Smacker can reach 1:12, but at the loss of quality (pixelation
Pixelation
In computer graphics, pixelation is an effect caused by displaying a bitmap or a section of a bitmap at such a large size that individual pixels, small single-colored square display elements that comprise the bitmap, are visible to the eye...

).

New versions of the Smacker file format also introduce Bink audio codec support.

Blizzard used this format for the cinematic videos seen in its famous games Warcraft II
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness is a fantasy-themed real-time strategy game published by Blizzard Entertainment and first released for DOS in 1995 and for Mac OS in 1996...

, StarCraft
StarCraft
StarCraft is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The first game of the StarCraft series was released for Microsoft Windows on 31 March 1998. With more than 11 million copies sold worldwide as of February 2009, it is one of the best-selling...

and Diablo I
Diablo (video game)
Diablo is a dark fantasy-themed action role-playing game developed by Blizzard North and released by Blizzard Entertainment on December 31, 1996....

. The Maxis
Maxis
Maxis is an American company founded as an independent video game developer in 1987. It is currently a subsidiary of Electronic Arts . Maxis is the creator of one of the best-selling computer games of all time, The Sims and its first sequel, The Sims 2...

 game SimCopter
SimCopter
SimCopter is a 1996 computer game from Maxis. This game is a 3D offshoot from Maxis's normal fare, putting the player into a 3D city. Like Streets of SimCity, SimCopter lets the user import SimCity 2000 maps into the game.- Objective :...

also uses this file format for ingame drive-in theaters.

External links

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