With many Phoronix readers being curious about reverse-engineering graphics drivers for open-source enablement, along the same lines you may also be curious about how reverse-engineering is done with video formats / video decoding by multimedia applications.

Vittorio Giovara presented at this past weekend's FOSDEM conference about video reverse engineering of multimedia applications with a focus on video decoding. Vittorio argues that it's "simpler than it looks" that even with there being so many audio and video file formats out there, a lot is shared in common between these formats.

Unfortunately the video isn't yet uploaded for this talk, but if you are curious about video reverse engineering, so far Vittorio's slides are available here in PDF format. The slides should be more useful once his video is available; check back for updates.