23 OCT 2025 - We are back! If you have been following us over the last few years, you will know that the last 2 months have been rough. We website was practically not loading. Sorry for the mess. We are back though and everything should run smoothly now. New servers. Updated domains. And new owners. We invite you all to start uploading torrents again!
This is a RAW dump of the Pichu Bros. short that was exclusive to the GameCube game, Pokémon Channel.
The short is stored on the disc in a proprietary video format (.h4m) created by Hudson for the GameCube exclusively.
Previosuly, no H4M decoder that could do both audio and video was available, and only the audio had been fully figured out. I removed the previous torrent as, almost as soon as I posted it, it became redundant. It was brought to my attention that a H4M decoder for **video** had actually been created late last year. Fantastic!
This dump was created using:
Video: https://github.com/Tilka/hvqm4
Audio: https://hcs64.com/mboard/forumlong.php?showthread=20147
The audio dumper I had used previously to get all the audio dumped from the EU version of the game (Which contains all languages). The video dumper on the other hand was new to me.
The program was in an absolute state. Essentially, there is very little documentation for this and it's not instantly obvious where to start, however, through some trial and error, the program does infact work.
In the end, it wasn't just as simple as "lol just compile it" as the program had a bug in it preventing it from outputting anything. Through some verbose debugging, it was discovered that the program doesn't actually create the folder needed to output all the frames for the video. After a quick fix to the code, we're off to the races. The program doesn't output any "video", but it does give us the raw frames. It also doesn't deal with any audio at all, hence the need for the second program. In the end however, I can't really bash the dev at all. He's done a fantastic job and cracking the codec open when no-one else could. Big thank you, Tilka!
My previous upload was just a simple screencap with proper replaced audio, but now, I present you with the RAW, uncompressed short in all it's glory. 11GB of pure, lossless goodness.
The short is split up into multiple parts, being;
```
Apart.h4m
party000.h4m
party00x.h4m
Bpart.h4m
```
"Apart" is the bulk of the short itself and plays until "party000". "party000" is a short segment that plays just before the ending song. The game then chooses at random between 8 different variants of the ending song (party00x.h4m). This is not randomly generated, it's all pre-rendered. Finally, a small ending segment is played after the song (Bpart.h4m).
So the structure is as follows.
```
Apart -> party000 -> party00x -> Bpart
```
The RAW frames were dumped as lossless .ppm files. This ffmpeg was then used to glue the frames into one video.
```
ffmpeg -pattern_type glob -framerate 29.97 -i "video_rgb_*.ppm" -c:v ffvhuff video.avi
```
When dumping the audio, **all** clips gave us this value as "Frame Interval"
```
Frame interval : 33367 microseconds
```
Doing
```
1/29.97 = 0.0333667
```
Which gives us the correct framerate :)
The frames were glued together individually for each part of the complete short (Apart, Bpart, etc). All languages were then dumped and muxed to each individual clip. Avidemux was used to glue all the parts together into one, giving us this final output.
One last thing to note is that text seen in the opening credits is actually added in by the game. 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". You can easily remove this text by 0'ing out the text using a hex editor.
Anyway, I imagine the last thing anyone wants is to deal with this massive 11GB lossless dump. It's truly overkill. I'm sharing this for 2 reasons
1. Preservation
2. Opening the floor to any budding encoders who wish to take a crack at fixing this up.
Lastly, I mentioned there were 8 different variants of the ending theme and I've only included one in this dump. The ending song variants are actually all different between the JP, EU and US versions of the game. EU has the cleanest video so I used that for this dump. I still have to dump all of the frames from the AU and US discs, so i'll make a separate torrent with all the individual parts (which hopefully isn't 200GB)
