[JarC]

Hi all,

I know this has been bashed before, but can't find a topic with actual numbers...

those that did the mve->avi (divx/mpg4) bit, could you give me some compression figures? tryin to figure out if I am doing it correctly...what I''d like to know is resulting filesizes presuming the resolution/colordepth is the same as the original

[Lightspeed]

you cant compress 256 colour DivX files

The files should (if you use DivX in ideal quality) have approximately the same size as the originals, some a bit more, some less.

[JarC]

same?!! size? ooooooohhhh

but then you also say 'DivX in ideal quality'...

define 'ideal quality', as there may be a world of difference between what you and I still find acceptable...in the case of FS cutscenes I would take it to mean 'identical'

to give an idea...I took the intro.mve from fs1 which is 85Mb and on the trial conversions I ran sofar, which I think are already reasonably acceptible (but not 100%) I got filesizes of between 20-30Mb just for the fs1 intro...

soooo....if 'same' size would already be 'generally expected' than I got plenty of room to play with...

[ChronoReverse]

I made mine smaller, but when I get some time, I'll probably be making a new encode at the same sizes for a "solid" encode, which should yield nearly the best quality achievable.

[Lightspeed]

same quality can NEVER be reached with DivX. It has a "quality limit" - which means you can never get it looking like the source.

With ideal quality I mean, the less compession as possible - the most quality possible.

[JarC]

that I can agree with, so....in short, start with a compression level that produces an avi roughly the same size and then raise the compression levels until the first artifacting becomes visible...

[ChronoReverse]

In the case of the videos that are in FS2, it is possible to have a better recompressed version.

I'm not saying that a 100% perfect copy of the original is possible, but that it's possible to make the new version look better than the original relatively easily.

This is because for some odd reason, the FS2 movies seem to have been compressed poorly, making them really blocky and ugly in places (meanwhile, the FS1 movies look A1 superb).

So by filtering it properly (actually, even simple deblocking helps a lot already), the resultant video can actually look better than the original.

[JarC]

hmmmm...there's indeed a substantial amount of quality differences between FS1/FS2 cutscenes...good point...was planning on combining the campaign files for FS1_port and FS2 together so I could play it back to back without the need to switch...if I were to have it use the cutscenes, that would be something to keep in mind

[Tnn]

I did Mve2Avi cutscenes from FS2 using DivX format, and they look very good in any Window player, but in game they look horribly blocky!
I guess because the movie is 640x320 while the game play is 1024x768 so when it scale-up full screen, it get blocky.
But I notice the original FS2 switch to 640 when playing .mve and back to 1024 when the movie end, FS2_Open does not!
Did I miss something? How do I make FS2_Open to switch screen when playing .avi movie?

[DaBrain]

You should use the DVD version for better results without increased filesize.


I know there was a FS1 DVD, but was there ever a FS2 DVD?