How-To: Pull the FMVs from PlayStation 2 Games

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to extract the FMVs (Full Motion Video) from Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts 2. littlestar has been playing KH2 for a while now, and finished the game last week. However, she didn't complete all the tasks to get the hidden ending at the end of the game, and lamented that she should have played the game at Hard difficulty, as it would have let her unlock the hidden ending without needing to complete a long, and tedious bunch of mini-games. In my typical fashion, I thought, this is ridiculous, and started working on extracting the videos from the PS2 disc -- luckily, there are several different communities which have already done it, so from there it was just a pulling it all together and updating them (where necessary).

Kingdom Hearts 2 is one of the more complicated games to extract the movies out of because Square Enix tends to encode their cinematics in a somewhat odd fashion -- perhaps this is due to localization needs, or some other requirement, but the PSS (PlayStation Stream) file that Square Enix uses for Kingdom Hearts 2 includes a audio stream without the header.

Programs you will need :

PSS-demux
Nova Extractor

Optional programs:

A Hex Editor (only if the header has been removed from the file - as in the case of KH2)
VirtualDubMod (if you want to re-encode the movies)

The first thing that needs to be done is to locate the FMVs on the disc. For this, you will use Nova Extractor to scan the disc to find the headers of the PSS files. This will mark all the potential movies. Extract the files after the search is complete.

At this point, you'll have some pss files. Run them through PSS-demux to split them into the video and audio stream. (or if you just want a watchable movie, leave it this way -- unless the game is Kingdom Hearts 2/Square Enix Game, in which case, the movie will be silent).

The output from PSS-demux is an mpg file and (in the case of Kingdom Hearts 2) a dat file. The dat file for KH2 has been stripped of its audio header, so that will need to be re-inserted in. Open up the Hex Editor and insert the Sony ATRAC3 header at the beginning of the file:

52 49 46 46 2A 2A 2A 2A 57 41 56 45 66 6D 74 20 20 00 00 00 70 02 02 00 80 BB 00 00 50 46 00 00 80 01 00 00 0E 00 01 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 64 61 74 61 2A 2A 2A 2A

You'll want the audio in a more usable format (in my case, since I like to watch things on my Mac, I reformatted the audio into constant bit-rate MPEG-3, but you can use anything you want.

After that, run VirtualDubMod, add the audio stream, and you now have a movie. Here's a short example of one from FFX-2: