[mjn.mixael]

I was talking about theora, I just figured that was understood.

[Mongoose]

These things are probably going to lag the hell out of my system, but awesome work anyway.

Edit: Okay, maybe I'm doing something wrong here, but I'm getting nothing but a solid-colored screen when I try to play these in-game (although the audio plays correctly); this is using the Inferno version of 3.6.12 RC2.  They also display only garbled video in an external player that plays the retail .ogg conversions just fine.  Any ideas?

[Dark RevenantX]

Works for me with VLC...

[The E]

Huh. These latest ones play OK for me (well, apart from my system lacking the power to decode them in FSO; VLC or other real media players have less trouble).

[Mongoose]

It could be that my system just isn't powerful enough to play them in FSO, but I'd expect them to play all right in an external player.  As I said, I'm able to play the converted retail cutscenes in a slightly-older version of The KMPlayer just fine, but these give me nothing but garbled output, and they flat-out crash Media Player Classic (via the Combined Community Codec Pack).  I'm able to (somewhat sluggishly) play other HD video files, so I'm not really sure what's going on.

[jr2]

Try updating your video drivers / and media players?  And maybe get the latest ffdshow codecs?  ( www.free-codecs.com )

[Mongoose]

I shouldn't have to mess around with the individual ffdshow codecs, as CCCP is pretty much the definitive way to play just about anything you throw at it.  And the reason I'm not using the most recent version of KMPlayer is because I don't like some of the mechanical changes that the new owner/developer has made.  I could attempt updating my video drivers at some point, but I'm still finding it strange that all of these players would play other .ogg files just fine, yet choke on these.

[Goober5000]

Mongoose, do you have a Mac?  The OGG fix isn't on OSX builds yet.

[mjn.mixael]

As for the playback difficulty in FSO, I'm probably going to render out some 720p more highly compressed versions of these. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow.

[Mongoose]

Mongoose, do you have a Mac?  The OGG fix isn't on OSX builds yet.

Heh, nope, just an XP box.

[Lukeskywalkie]

I know you don't want to digging into codecs, but I had a similar problem (audio fine, video showing only first frame) in-game and vlc, and grabbing new codecs from the official site, specifically the newer direct show filters, fixed it for me, right as rain.
http://xiph.org/dshow/
 Odds are you've been using the same filters you picked up the last time you tried to use a vorbis or flac file. I know mine was wayyy out of date, and it is an unusual format that most players aren't going to tolerate native, particularly the direct show family ( WMP, VLC)
Just try it. they're easy to remove if it doesn't work for you.

[Mongoose]

I guess I could at least try seeing if there's a newer version of CCCP available, and then maybe go from there.  I think part of the problem may be that .ogg is an uncommon video format (I don't think I've ever seen it used besides the SCP), so some of these codec packs may not be particularly adept at handling them.

(I'll have to start a "Stop using VLC!" campaign at some point, unless it's markedly better than it was some time ago.  It was freaking terrible when I tried using it a few years back. )

[General Battuta]

Huh? VLC is excellent.

[Mongoose]

It could be now, but back when I was using it a few years ago, it exhibited such wonderful properties as taking a good five or six seconds to respond to a skip attempt while playing a video, topped off by another few seconds of massive video distortion.  Once I stumbled across KMPlayer, I never looked back at VLC.  I don't want to drag this thread even further off-topic, so I'll save that discussion for another venue.

[Fenrir]

Huh? VLC is excellent.

Not really. Its only advantage is that you can throw anything at it and it'll play without you having to install or configure anything. But once you start getting above SD resolutions playback really starts to suffer. Install CCCP along with Media Player Classic and you'll see a very noticeable improvement.

[mjn.mixael]

720s are up. Download those if you have lag issues.

[Mongoose]

...okay, you guys are going to love the solution to this one.  I downloaded one of the 720p versions to test it out, and the results looked a little bit more like they were supposed to, but the playback was still mostly solid-colored.  So I thought about it for a second...and then I remembered a certain Launcher flag.  I've always had "Disable scale-to-window for movies" selected, since the retail .ogg conversions are grainy to begin with; I didn't want them to look even worse than they had to by default.  So, as it turns out, instead of the 1080p versions playing back completely "solid-colored"...

...I'd simply been seeing an extremely-zoomed in view of the center of each video.

...yeah.

So if anyone else out there forgot they had that flag selected, flip it off, and everything should work out fine.  Even when they're playing right, the 1080p versions still lag the hell out of my system, and they're much bigger than my monitor requires anyway, so 720p is definitely the way to go for me.  Thanks a ton, mjn.mixael.

(I still can't play even the 720p versions outside of the game, so I'll have to figure out what's going on there. At least they work where they need to, though.)

[Lukeskywalkie]

VLC's gotten a bit better, but it's still DirectShow and a lot of poorly optimized filters. For anything above 480, I usually MPC. I still keep vlc around for music or for greater file compatibility.  In this case, I gave it a try, because it has some rudimentary ogg implementation, and media player classic does not.  I've got that all fixed up.
Agreed, VLC isn't always going to produce the best image quality, but it is simple, and makes a good starting point and/or 'what the hell is this file' tool.

[Col. Fishguts]

Those are beautiful! Thanks for all your efforts that went into making these

[jr2]

...okay, you guys are going to love the solution to this one. 

...Maybe put this as a warning in the first post by the download links to prevent future headaches, mjn?