Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Jake101 on March 14, 2005, 11:22:21 pm

Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Jake101 on March 14, 2005, 11:22:21 pm: Just wondering if it would be possible to implement support of the mp3 file format for audio in FRED's messages, if this is being worked on now, for the future, or if maybe there's already a way to do it...? Being able to use the mp3 format for dialogue sound files would be a tremendous advantage for reducing overall campaign file sizes. Mp3 compression allows a much smaller file size than wav, and maintains quality.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Taristin on March 14, 2005, 11:31:42 pm: MP3 was ruled out because of liscencing issues. It costs money to use that format.
But there may soon be Ogg interface support, since AFAIK, Ogg is supported...
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: WMCoolmon on March 14, 2005, 11:40:09 pm: Working OGG sound support has been in for...phew, a long time, actually. I think it was one of the first things I fixed after my hiatus.

This build is probably the most stable with working OGG support (music included).
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,31241.0.html
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Grug on March 14, 2005, 11:54:15 pm: What about a list of suitbale encoders and decoders, and maybe some programs that we can use to edit them. I know winamp can have ogg support but ehrg... winamp. :doubt:

I will have to check but does Audacity work with them?
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: WMCoolmon on March 15, 2005, 12:39:32 am: Audacity does on my system.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Zarax on March 15, 2005, 01:22:45 am: Why don't you try a directshow routine do decompress the files on mission loading using they system onboard filters?
This way you can use any kind of compressed files (as long as WMP can play them) without any licensing issue and slowdowns (except the first time they load in a mission since the file has to be decoded to a wav).
It's more flexible and everyone uses whatever codec he likes.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: aldo_14 on March 15, 2005, 03:46:32 am: Isn't DirectShow Windows only?

In which case it'd - I'd assume - be a no-no in terms of Linux / Mac (any other 'format'?) porting.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Zarax on March 15, 2005, 03:50:03 am: DirectShow is part of DirectX and is fully supported on Mac and in a few linux distros.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: WMCoolmon on March 15, 2005, 04:03:04 am: DirectX isn't fully supported - at least, not by Microsoft - on any platform other than Windows, AFAIK. Certainly not on Linux. Winex might be able to handle it, but that's about it.

Anyway-
1) There'd be more Win32 only code. This would needlessly clutter it up, add more possiblity for OS-specific bugs, etc.
2) It's probably going to be slower because DirectShow would have to be initialized. That might let us do a little onboard hardware acceleration with sound, but not much.
3) The only person who has experience with DirectShow is RT
4) OGG code, in some form or another, has been in since 3.6.5. It's been declared fixed 2 or 3 times, at least, but has only started working for me (reliably, anyway) with the last fixes. Not one campaign, AFAIK, has attempted to make use of it besides TBP.
5) OGG is simply, IMHO, the best format out there. It's open source, there's no licensing or patent issues to worry about, it has better compression quality than MP3 at equivelant bitrates, and it's fully, natively, supported on Linux, Mac, and PC. Adding a DirectShow decoder would just end up causing more Windows-only campaigns, where sound effects and music would only work under windows. Or, people would have to go to the hassle of getting DirectShow up and working on whatever platform they use.
6) With OGG, it's drop in and go. No hassle or fuss with codecs. The only thing you have to worry about is a CTD because of some kind of bug. ;)
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: taylor on March 15, 2005, 10:47:24 am: Quote
Originally posted by Zarax
DirectShow is part of DirectX and is fully supported on Mac and in a few linux distros.

Umm, no. Ther is no "support" for DirectX under Linux or OSX. You can get around it with special libs (or Wine) that can use Win32 dlls but those things aren't made to be used by a game. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get working in FS2_Open. Also those things only work properly on x86 systems (32-bit builds) which means no PPC (Linux or OSX) and no x86_64 (which includes me using a 64-bit build).
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Zarax on March 15, 2005, 10:53:14 am: I'm 100% sure about OSX, i'll dig out for docs at MS...
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: taylor on March 15, 2005, 11:26:19 am: Coderus MacDX doesn't count (if that's what you're thinking of), it's not free. Plus it's only a partial implementation and so doesn't make use of DirectShow as far as I know, so it won't use the audio/video codecs (ie. uses QuickTime instead). I've never seen anything in MSDN about DirectX available for OSX and they should at least have an SDK if it was available. If you can dig up a link to something then I'll take a look.

We still have to have Linux support though. Support for 2 out the 3 platforms isn't acceptable.
Title: mp3s for Messages in FRED?
Post by: Zarax on March 15, 2005, 11:34:11 am: I'm not going to argue until i've got something...
Until then, you're the coders and the choice is yours :)