[The E]

Okay. Now that we have that sorted, are you absolutely sure that the video in question is encoded with Theora for video, and Vorbis for audio.

I'll check the code in the meantime.

[origin]

The problem is the encoding of the video.  I downloaded a ogg from the net and using it the mission ran properly.  Thanks for helping me to clean up all of the other screw ups on my set up.  It is asham that freespace uses ogg, I have been trying to find a decent converter for quite awhile, I thought I had one that gave semi good results but obviously not. 

[karajorma]

Karajorma; any reason this can't be used in multi?
*not suggesting xfer for the cutscene though..

The big problem is that there is no easy way to set up the briefing room unless all the players are in it. So if one player stays behind to watch a cutscene they'll probably time out and be disconnected. The only real solution would be to force all the players to watch a cutscene until they all decide to skip.

That makes the code significantly more complicated to implement.

[QuantumDelta]

Can't we just use a state change packet? similar to the way all clients wait at the end of load or weapons loadout on commit?

[The E]

The problem is the encoding of the video.  I downloaded a ogg from the net and using it the mission ran properly.  Thanks for helping me to clean up all of the other screw ups on my set up.  It is asham that freespace uses ogg, I have been trying to find a decent converter for quite awhile, I thought I had one that gave semi good results but obviously not. 

Well, if you can find us a movie codec we can use without licensing issues, go ahead.

Also, Theora is one of the standard codecs, and there are more than enough converters that can produce valid ogg files. VLC, for example. Or avidemux. Or Handbrake.

[origin]

I found a very good converter (not a whole lot of options) called Hyper Video Converter that is free and works really well with my setup.

One question though - is there a way to control the video size in the game or does it always default to full screen?

[karajorma]

Can't we just use a state change packet? similar to the way all clients wait at the end of load or weapons loadout on commit?

The problem is that the movie code doesn't send out the "I'm still alive" packets that other parts of the code do. So there is no way to tell if the other player is still there watching a movie or has crashed out. I assume that it would be possible make it do so but it's quite a lot of work for something that I suspect most players on multi are just simply going to skip. For the most part people barely bother with the briefings after reading them once.

[QuantumDelta]

Heh, I suppose you're right, unless it's voice acted, I rarely even bother paying attention to the briefings in the first place ;\
I just figured it might have been a nice idea for how to fix command briefs (by making them videos) / adding cutscenes into the multi campaign conversion but eh