Another DivX? Guess so.

This is the WV1F video codec used by Heroine Anthem for its movie files. The FourCC for these files is WV1F and the actual codec name is wv1f Codec 1.0a.

It appears to be some kind of a DivX or OpenDivX hack that relies on a load of special functions, which is why the regular codec will not work.

It does not seem to be installable … might be missing a few entry points needed by Windows. If anyone has ideas about how to install it, please let me know. I can get it as an option in VirtualDub for encoding but Windows Media Player still thinks wv1f has nothing associated with that FourCC.

You can, however, use it by piggy-backing off another codec’s install, namely DivX. This will involve overwriting two of your DivX files in \Windows\System32\ so back them up! don’t worry, after you install wv1f you can still play DivX.

Which brings me to another point, with all DivX software removed from the PC, playing a DivX file results in a new registry key being created: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Winthunder Era\wv1fcodec.” This should be proof wv1f is indeed handling DivX files, so it somehow must be a related codec.

To install, extract this archive, rename “wv1f.dll” to “DivX.dll”, copy both files to Windows\System32\, and delete or rename “divxdec.ax.”

Now you will need to use the FourCC changer included with Xvid, “AviC.exe,” or just hex edit the Heroine Anthem movies and change their FourCC to DIVX.

The videos will all play now, but they play upside down, and they only show key frames. This really is not enough to translate them. I posted all this in hopes maybe someone better with Win32 stuff, specifically video, may be able to help out.

Byuu and I already tried our best and this is all we could do. If nobody can figure this out, the videos will either never be translated, or we’ll have to explore demuxing them, dubbing the audio with an English voice, and merging the streams, but without a working wv1f codec that may be difficult, if not impossible.

Please help if you can, or ask someone you know who might be able to. That is the only chance you have of seeing the game with English subtitles instead of Chinese.

I’m loathe to dub because the movies are not voiced in the first place, and it would be hard to near-match voices like Edda and Bedin, where they are heard frequently in other parts of the game.

For those wondering how all these advancements were made, byuu and I plugged at this all morning.

There’s a hidden file, “wv1f.dat,” in the Heroine Anthem program folder. When I messed with the game EXE, changing the first occurrence of the word DivX caused all movies in the game to display just black with broken overlays.

We tracked it down and discovered the program was spawning a new file, $$TEMP$$\mzx7jipt.qov, whenever a movie played. We grabbed this file before the game could delete it and ran it through PE Explorer where it turned out to be a DLL file with the entry points “encore” and “decore,” the same ones as codecs like DivX. It also had “DriverProc,” which kind of threw us off.

Long story short, since all signs pointed to this codec being a DivX clone (DivX Player even recognizes it… then dies), we overwrote DivX and got what you see here today.

I’ve tested and confirmed it will be possible to dub the audio tracks if worse comes to worse. I replaced the intro music with Walk the Dinosaur (boom, boom, aka laka boom boom) and it still plays fine. So it will be English one way or another, this is a more quality control thing than anything else.

Still, if you know anyone with a good voice and a Scandinavian language family accent, you may want to start talking to them.