[Mets]

After adding the Theora movies, I'm having a problem with the video picture.  The game now does not minimize to play the AVI movies in the large screen size.  Instead it plays the movies in-game in a much smaller window.  But now instead of seeing the cutscences, I'm only getting a lot of colored pixels where the movie is supposed to be playing.  It's not a codec problem, because the cutscences work fine in media player.  Any ideas?



!!EDIT - 1/4/2007!!!
Problem was fixed.  If you are experiencing this problem:
1) replace all AVI's with the OGG videos,
2) in the Launcher, under the video tab, select OpenGL instead of Direct3D
3) set screen resolution to 1024 x 768, 32-bit.
4) turn Anisotropic filter to Off
-Done, should work fine, and you should have all videos at max size with perfect colors and no pixels.

[Huggybaby]

OK, I found you. see my other post, you should be using ogg's or mve's.

[Mets]

AVI's? They're obsolete. You should be using ogg's or worst case mve's, as indicated in my guide.

I know I replaced the AVI's that come with Shivan's pack with the Ogg/Theora and that's when I got the problem.  AVI's worked fine.

[Huggybaby]

I think something similar may have been reported elsewhere and they're looking into it.

In the meantime, have you installed ANY kind of third party player/codec pack, like k-lite, etc? If codecs get bad enough out of hand you have to basically reinstall Windows.

Codec's have given me and everyone else huge problems in the past, and are on their way out. There are now players that don't need them. I recommend BSPlayer, it's truly the bomb.

[Mets]

Ok, update on the problem.  First I'll give a little bit of background.  I downloaded the 1.5c full pack from Shivan.  I started the game and everything worked fine.  That pack comes with the DivX AVIs.  On the cutscences, the game would minimize and the AVI files would play just fine.

I updated the game to 1.8 and then 1.9c.  I then downloaded the newest cutscences in OGG/Theora format.  I tried to use those and had the above problem.

I then erased the Theora's and restored the AVI files back to their original spot.  Now the AVI's won't work at all.  The sound plays, the divx codec loads up, but there is no video.  So now I essentially have either AVI's with no video, or Ogg's with really, really, bad pixelly video.

Anybody know how to fix this?

[Huggybaby]

Did you follow my guide? LOL (what else am I going to say?)

Are you using the latest 3.6.9 exe and launcher? That's KIND OF important, since that's how the Theora support became supported, so to speak.

[Mets]

lol, yes I followed the guide, and yes I am using 3.6.9  I also applied the patch to FS1 port, and I updated OpenAL to the newest.

I tried the game with OpenGL instead of Direct3DB and it is better.  The AVI's now actually work.  However, certain movies do not display in the proper color when using OpenGL.  Red's appear grey, the movies are dark, and there's a lot of purple colors too.  This is not the case if I just open the movie in media player and watch it.  Oddly enough, this discoloration didn't effect the intro movie... 

What in the world is going on lol

[Huggybaby]

You keep switching back and forth between movie formats. Forget avi's forever,  they are obsolete, so it doesn't matter whether they work or half-work or don't work at all. It's between mve and ogg.

But you didn't answer my most important question:

have you installed ANY kind of third party player/codec pack, like k-lite, etc?

[taylor]

Theora movies do not work properly in D3D, and that isn't likely to be fixed anytime soon.  There simply isn't a D3D coder to fill in the missing code so that it is able to display the frames properly.  In future versions of the player, you won't even be able to play Theora movies in D3D mode, it will simply skip playing altogether.  Until someone comes along to fix the D3D code, there really isn't another option.

And like Huggybaby said, consider AVIs gone.  There aren't going to work in any future builds so there isn't much point in keeping them around except for play around with the broken AVI support in older versions.

[Mets]

Sorry, yes I did.  I installed the standard DirectShow plugins from the binaries made by illiminable that you get here:
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

Why is AVI support going to go, the movies are only 50mb bigger total than the Ogg's (290 vs 225 for FS2 and 143 vs 153 for FS1)?  Where can I get the MVE's?

[Mets]

N/m found the MVE's.  Since I'm new, perhaps somebody can explain why there are so many movie formats...Not to bring up a contentious issue, but why would you use MVE's over AVI's?  The MVE's total 800+ MB in size, the AVI's are half of that.  The Oggs are maybe 50mb smaller than the AVI's and don't work with D3D.

[Turey]

but why would you use MVE's over AVI's?

Because they are the original cutscene files that come with the game, so the code to play them is already there.

[Mr_Maniac]

N/m found the MVE's.  Since I'm new, perhaps somebody can explain why there are so many movie formats...Not to bring up a contentious issue, but why would you use MVE's over AVI's?  The MVE's total 800+ MB in size, the AVI's are half of that.  The Oggs are maybe 50mb smaller than the MVE's and don't work with D3D.

1. AVI files were played through DirectShow. This caused some Problems.
2. Linux and MacOS don't have DirectShow
3. FS2_Open needed a - also open - format that can be played without installing additional codecs/players. There WOULD be methods to play AVIs through the engine, but as far as I understand, some ways of realizing this would cause license-problems. License problems between FS2_Open and the player/codec and license problems for the codecs themself (MPEG4 License). Even IF AVI support would be given, it would HAVE to be ONE codec and no others...
XviD/OGG for example.

Just look in the other threads about FS2_Open 3.6.9 and OGG.

EDIT:
Oh... And there aren't so many file formats. Only two in the near future. AFAIK, AVI-Support will be removed.
So it's only MVE and Theora/OGG

[Mets]

Makes sense, except for the codec part, since you have to install Ogg codecs and Theora codecs to play the Ogg/Theora movies

Is there any way to fix my initial problem though - the fact that the Ogg/Theora movies are playing at half of the size that they should be, and aren't showing anything but a pixelly mess of a picture?

[taylor]

Why is AVI support going to go, the movies are only 50mb bigger total than the Ogg's (290 vs 225 for FS2 and 143 vs 153 for FS1)?  Where can I get the MVE's?

Well, technically we have never had AVI support.  We had DirectShow support, but that's it.  By having DirectShow support we don't need to support any particular movie format, since it can allow access to most AVI formats, WMV, MPG, and others.  But DirectShow was never really meant to be used the way we were using it.  It plays in a separate window from the game, has it's own message and input handling, and is totally at the mercy of the codecs installed on each users system.  We just can't continue to support something that has the ability to work completely differently for every single person that uses the game.

MVE support didn't originally exist, ripped it out of the game's source code for licensing reasons.  The format was later reverse engineered and included in other games.  Eventually it was just decided to finally support it in FSO, even though the licensing issues still exist.  But since MVE support wasn't always available, and people needed support for some movie format, DirectShow support was added.

But other than the endless technical issues with using DirectShow, it only worked under Windows.  We support OS X and Linux though, which means anyone using AVI movies in their mods will only for Windows users and not the rather large OS X and Linux user base.

So we searched for a new codec to replace DirectShow, but with a specific set of goals:
 - it had to be a modern and feature rich codec
 - it had to be cross-platform so that it would work on all three platforms we support
 - it had to be directly embedded in the game binary, not some external lib or program interface
 - it couldn't have licensing issues which precluded our using it

Theora fit those conditions since it's under an open source license that allows us to integrate it with the engine, is cross-platform, and presents the movie data in a way that we can easily plug it into the existing audio and graphic support of the game.

So, that's why Theora, and why we are dumping DirectShow (AVI) support.


As for MVEs, most people already have them, and there is no reason that they should have to install something else unless they want to.  So the MVEs aren't required.  The only people who might want them are people with slower computers.  The MVE player is a lot less resource intensive than the Theora player will ever be, so MVEs can play easier on slow systems.

Regarding file size of AVI vs. OGG, the OGGs were converted with quality in mind.  They are at least 15% larger than they would be with default settings.  But higher quality settings were used for both video and audio in order to enhance the movies.  The quality settings varied based on each individual movie, with some getting very high quality settings, and others getting slightly more than default quality settings.  The resulting file size was barely even a secondary concern.

Makes sense, except for the codec part, since you have to install Ogg codecs and Theora codecs to play the Ogg/Theora movies

No, the codecs are built into the game.  Just because Microsoft doesn't include Ogg Theora support by default so that you can play the movies outside of the game has absolutely no bearing on us what-so-ever.  DivX and XviD support aren't included by default either, and you don't seem to be complaining about that.  For AVI support you had to manually install one of those in the first place just to be able to play movies inside the game, much less outside. 

Is there any way to fix my initial problem though - the fact that the Ogg/Theora movies are playing at half of the size that they should be, and aren't showing anything but a pixelly mess of a picture?

D3D is unsupported, don't use it.  Use OpenGL and you won't get the pixelation.  I'm still not clear whether that fixes your half-size problem, but you haven't really explained it that well either, so I'm not even sure what the issue actually is.  Make sure that you don't have -noscalevid selected in the Launcher.

[Mets]

 Ah, thanks taylor that makes sense.  I didn't know you embeded the Ogg/Theora codecs in the game.  Why version of the codecs does the game use, because I don't seem to be having any movie problems outside the game.

Now that I see what was happening with the divx videos, the "half-size" problem might not be a problem.  Here's a full explanation. 

(assuming I'm in D3D mode)
AVI's, v1.5c  ---  initial configuration
With the AVIs, on a cutscence, the game would minimize and the divx tray tool would load up.  The cutscence played in a separate window like you mentioned, but it was a really big window that spanned across the entire screen (horizontally not vertically).  I thought, wow, that's a really serious intro movie.  This was with version 1.5c from Shivan's pack.



Still in D3D, I finished downloading and installing the upgrades to bring it to version 1.9b, along with patching the port of FS1 and making the minor adjustments/deletions/configurations, minus hardware tuning, mentioned Huggybaby's guide.  This included adding the Ogg's and getting rid of the AVI's.

Ogg/Theora, v1.9b
I ran the game the first time with the Oggs, and the videos played in this really small window in game.  It's at best half the size of what the AVI movies play at, and, like I mentioned, was just a bunch of pixels, no visible images could be made out.  It's the computer equivalent of trying to watch HBO on your TV when your not paying for it.

back to AVI's. v1.9b
Not happy with the Ogg movies, I switched back to the AVI's (unaware of the reasons taylor mentioned).  To my surprise, they now wouldn't even play.  The divx codec was still loading in the system tray, the game was minimizing, the sound was playing, but the video had disappeared. 

Now pretty confused, I started the process over again with OpenGL

(in OpenGL mode, all version 1.9b)
AVI's
With the AVI's, I find that I get a large, full-scale size movie with sound, but they are played in-game, not a different window.  The game doesn't minimize.  The only problem is that there is discoloration.  Images are all fine in terms of shape, but they appear in different colors.  For example, in the Colossus cutscene, what would normally be a red box around the colored text "Classified, Level Rho" ends up being a gray box around gray text in a gray movie.  There are also random purple textures in the animations.  It's like the movies were reduced to grayscale plus some purple.

Strangely, however, this problem didn't appear in the intro movie, which worked fine. 

Ogg/Theora
I haven't tested the Ogg/Theora in OpenGL mode, but perhaps they will work perfectly and all of these problems will go away.  I'll edit this paragraph when they finish re-downloading and post what happens.

Thanks for your help everybody, sorry to be such a noob...

[taylor]

Ah, thanks taylor that makes sense.  I didn't know you embeded the Ogg/Theora codecs in the game.  Why version of the codecs does the game use, because I don't seem to be having any movie problems outside the game.

It uses the current versions of everything.  But, it's dependant on the game settings directly unlike playing them outside of the game.  That means that it would use OpenGL or D3D to actually display the video, and OpenAL to play the audio.

Ogg/Theora, v1.9b
I ran the game the first time with the Oggs, and the videos played in this really small window in game.  It's at best half the size of what the AVI movies play at, and, like I mentioned, was just a bunch of pixels, no visible images could be made out.  It's the computer equivalent of trying to watch HBO on your TV when your not paying for it.

Known D3D issue, it won't be fixed.  The video image just isn't decoded properly so that D3D can show it.  This is more an issue of there not actually being real D3D code there though.  If you use OpenGL mode then it uses OpenGL directly to show the video frames, and it can do this very quickly and cleanly.

back to AVI's. v1.9b
Not happy with the Ogg movies, I switched back to the AVI's (unaware of the reasons taylor mentioned).  To my surprise, they now wouldn't even play.  The divx codec was still loading in the system tray, the game was minimizing, the sound was playing, but the video had disappeared. 

Again, known D3D issue.  It's just that DirectShow creates a new window to show the video in.  The problem is that this window can end up behind the game window.  That lets you hear the audio, but since the video window is behind the game window, you simply can't see the video.  This has various nasty work arounds, and is a big reason that we are dropping DirectShow support, there is simply no way to get it working properly in the game.

(in OpenGL mode, all version 1.9b)
AVI's
With the AVI's, I find that I get a large, full-scale size movie with sound, but they are played in-game, not a different window.  The game doesn't minimize.  The only problem is that there is discoloration.  Images are all fine in terms of shape, but they appear in different colors.  For example, in the Colossus cutscene, what would normally be a red box around the colored text "Classified, Level Rho" ends up being a gray box around gray text in a gray movie.  There are also random purple textures in the animations.  It's like the movies were reduced to grayscale plus some purple.

It does still play in a separate window, we have no choice in the matter.  It might seem like it's in the same window, but that's actually a little trick to make it look that way.  The difference here, between OpenGL and D3D, is that the OpenGL code has a hack to prevent the game window from minimizing.  This helps make sure that the movie window is always in front of the game window.

But for color issues, we can't do anything about it.  Remember that it's DirectShow which actually plays and displays the movie.  Asside from telling it what file to play, we don't have much control over it.  If there is a problem with the playback then the chances of knowing what that problem is/was and fixing are practically none.  Again, another reason we are dumping DirectShow support.  With the Theora player we have direct control over every aspect of it, so what ever problems show up we can fix.

[Huggybaby]

I installed the standard DirectShow plugins from the binaries made by illiminable

I'll bet thats part of the problem too.

Get one of the new players like BS Player that don't rely on external codec packs. Those codec packs have caused too much trouble for too many people. Stuff like k-lite and cccp are going the way of the dinosaur.

Mets, hopefully you've installed Shivan's 1.9C and not 1.9B?

[Mets]

Problem fixed!  I turned on OpenGL and used the Ogg/Theora videos and they work great.  Right size, no pixelation, no weird colors.  Totally perfect, so there you go taylor.

HOWEVER - after testing some of the videos, I have found that some of them are imcomplete.  I noticed immediately that the video on the Colossus is only 11mb and also only 44 seconds.  The Colossus video has about 2:15 run time.  I'm not sure if this problem is true for others or not.  I'll do a run through of all the videos tonight.  I downloaded the FS2 OGG pack from the megauploads mirror, so I'm not sure if it's just there or on all servers.  This level is pretty early in the campaign, which is why I noticed it, so somebody might want to take a look at it.

[Huggybaby]

Indeed. Thanks mets, my colossus is 11 meg and it should be 40. I'm fixing it now.