Why the videos do not play
2026-10-24, the video session.
POD starts with two videos, the Ubi Soft logo and an intro, and ends a championship with two more. On a modern machine none of them plays. The game shows a still picture instead: Indeo is not installed.
Why the game refuses
Before every video, play_video (FUN_00460570) asks indeo_installed (FUN_00460120). That function reads VIDC.IV41 from the [Drivers32] section of SYSTEM.INI. The value must be exactly ir41_32.dll, and IR41_32.DLL must be in the system folder. Intel's setup on the disc, IVI_95NT.EXE, wrote both. If either is missing, the game shows NoIndeo.Bbm and skips the video. Two of Gold's builds, the Direct3D ones, do not skip: they crash in their AVI player.
When the check passes, the game plays the file through Windows' AVI library. It asks AVIStreamGetFrameOpen for the video stream, so Windows picks the codec and the picture format. It hands the sound stream's format straight to waveOutOpen, so Windows converts the ADPCM. The intro has five sound tracks, one a language; the game picks one by its language setting. All of this is in Videos.
The sound
The six files are Indeo Video Interactive 4.1 pictures with Microsoft ADPCM sound, except INTROCD.AVI, whose sound is plain PCM. POD's new pod-video crate reads the AVI files and decodes the sound as Microsoft's documentation describes it. Every sound stream equals the output of the ffmpeg program, sample for sample. One detail mattered: the prediction is divided by 256, rounding toward zero, not shifted.
A decoder withdrawn
The session also wrote a decoder for the pictures, and a codec around it, and they worked: in the emulated PC, Gold played the logo and the intro with no NoIndeo picture. But the decoder was not clean. Its tables were read from FFmpeg's compiled library, and some of its rules from FFmpeg's compiled code. The project builds clean-room implementations only (AGENTS.md, rule 8), so the decoder and the codec were deleted before they were published.
What stays is the method. Intel's own codec is on Gold's disc, in the INSTALL folder. The format is now being written down from that DLL alone: its tables by their addresses there, its rules traced in its code and checked by running it under the emulator on Gold's frames. A fresh session will write the decoder from that specification.