Pocket Monsters - Boku-tachi Pichu Brothers - Party wa oosawagi! no maki [v1-RAW] [B38DAC23].mkv

Wow this project was an insane pain in the ass.

This short was released exclusively through the GameCube game "Pokémon Channel". No DVD release, no re-airings, nothing. The only way to view the full special is by playing through the game, which also unlocks other language tracks. As you watch the short, Pikachu, who plays a major role is this thrilling game, is constantly making noise. This makes it hard to record and get a clean output

The short is stored on the disc in a proprietary video format (.h4m) created by Hudson for the GameCube exclusively. Despite various attempts, only the audio has been completely decoded and made extractable. The video is essentially a series of JPG's put together to make frames, as far as I can understand it.

The text seen in the opening credits is actually added in by the game and can easily be removed through the use of a hex editor. This makes sense when you think of the space saved by only storing one video and having the different languages text added on during "gameplay". Another thing to note is that the ending credits where "Mewoths Party" plays isn't actually randomly generated, well, not in real time. The game randomly chooses between a number of different renders of the ending scene to playback.

So knowing this, a rough attempt has been made to preserve this. Since a full .h4m decoder is likely not to be available anytime soon, this will have to do until that day comes.

A clean dump of the GameCube's NTSC ISO was made. The text for the English version was 0'd out using a hex editor, which causes the game to simply display nothing in place of the text.** Using Dolphin as a means of playback, OBS was used in lossless mode to record at the exact original resolution that the game is played back in.

The audio was extracted using the .h4m audio decoder which has been circulating for a few years now. More info can be found here - https://hcs64.com/mboard/forumlong.php?showthread=20147

The final video output had the beginning and end of the video spliced using avidemux to avoid re-encoding the lossless output.
The lossless dump of all audio channels was then spliced together within VEGAS to sync up to the final video. The audio was then output in it's original specifications back to .WAV's.
As the audio was not modified, we could use this to make sure the emulation did not speed up or slow down during playback.

As I mentioned before, the ending song is random and chosen by the game. For the sake of the encode, we just used whatever the game gave us and made sure to sync the correct audio to it.
The massive lossless 3GB final file was then passed on to be encoded, giving us this final output.

Any visible compression artifacts are a result of the .h4m compression scheme and not the final encode.

The video file contains the following language tracks
Japanese (Narration)
Japanese
English
German
French
Spanish
Italian
(All tracks are AAC at 44.1khz)

Video:
Resolution: 640x480
Codec: MPEG-4 (AVC) (.mkv mux)
Framerate: 29.97fps (VFR)

A v2 will be made whenever the .h4m compression scheme is fully decoded. This won't likely bare any visible quality increase, but it'll allow us to at least fully preserve the original files within the disc (as well as get outputs of all ending song variations).

I hope you enjoy the effort we've made!

**As this was discovered AFTER the project had already been completed, the "creditless" version will be reserved for a v2, aka, when the actual video codec is fully cracked.