[Col. Fishguts]

Raider Wars has a DivX outro, and madaboutgames is working on a campaign with several videos between missions.
WCS will have an intro and other cutscenes IIRC, don't know about the other MODs.

So, avi is used, although not heavily (yet). Re-encoding the videos to mve would be some work, but nothing too serious. I'm more concerned about the quality of the mve movies. But if it could be improved, that would be great, because as of now, DivX/XviD offers superior quality at smaller file sizes.

On the other hand, I can see the beauty of an in-code player for movies, that would work on all platforms without relying on OS handled video playback.

[Colonol Dekker]

Can i just check what formats the scp supports, AVI im sure, but what other formats and parameters are needed?

[karajorma]

Windows supports anything that DirectShow can play (which is basically anything Windows Media Player can play). Not certain about Linux and MacOS though.

[Colonol Dekker]

Erk, FS2 is build on Direct X, how could i be so stupid..........
What you're saying is i could have any media video, any res (as long as my vid-card supports it) and FS2 will play it as long as its in the movies folder and i reference it in the campaign editor?

[taylor]

Raider Wars has a DivX outro, and madaboutgames is working on a campaign with several videos between missions.
WCS will have an intro and other cutscenes IIRC, don't know about the other MODs.

So, avi is used, although not heavily (yet). Re-encoding the videos to mve would be some work, but nothing too serious. I'm more concerned about the quality of the mve movies. But if it could be improved, that would be great, because as of now, DivX/XviD offers superior quality at smaller file sizes.

I'm not sure what quality the gstreamer plugin has, but no doubt it could be improved if needed.  The main problem with MVE is that is at most 16-bit color.  That will give you gradient problems and what not.

The other issue is that, all of the mods using DivX, can only do so as long as the AVI code works.  There are no DirectX people active in the project any longer, and we are moving away from most DirectX code.  Direct3D is stale and will likely get removed before too long, DirectSound is getting replaced with OpenAL since no one here knows anything about DirectSound (and I'm doing most of the sound work which means OpenAL only), DirectInput will likely get replaced with SDL since that makes the code much cleaner and easier to work with (and since the input upgrades are coming from me and I know SDL only).  If the AVI playback breaks then there may be no one to fix it.  That's why I want to try and get away from a platform specific movie player if at all possible.  ffmpeg would work on Linux, Windows, and OS X, but with the many possible legal issues I'm hesitant to actually finalize the code and commit it to CVS.

The best thing would be to pick one, and only one, movie format.  We support that one and exclude all others.  If that one isn't MVE then we can support two formats, since the MVE code is already taken care of.  Whether it's a Theora/Ogg combo or h.264, or something else entirely, doesn't really matter as long as we can get around the legal issues, and everyone makes their movies in that format.

What you're saying is i could have any media video, any res (as long as my vid-card supports it) and FS2 will play it as long as its in the movies folder and i reference it in the campaign editor?

Yes, but that would only work under Windows, which excludes about half of your available audience.

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm not a fan of Penguins or apples really, They both demonic icons 
Cheers for the heads up, "dons his 3ds max cap"

[Col. Fishguts]

*snip*
Whether it's a Theora/Ogg combo or h.264, or something else entirely, doesn't really matter as long as we can get around the legal issues, and everyone makes their movies in that format.

What are the legal issues with GPL ? I thought open source is open source.

[Goober5000]

It's complicated, but basically Volition imposed restrictions that the GPL doesn't.  Thus they're incompatible.

LGPL is closely related to GPL, but it's different enough to allow flexibility for licenses like Volition's in certain situations.

[CaptJosh]

IIRC, the FreeBSD license is even better that LGPL in this case, I think. You can use FreeBSD stuff to make closed source stuff, even for profit. So anything that was developed for FreeBSD is probably a good idea. It allows the most flexibility I've seen outside of a creative commons license.

[taylor]

IIRC, the FreeBSD license is even better that LGPL in this case, I think. You can use FreeBSD stuff to make closed source stuff, even for profit. So anything that was developed for FreeBSD is probably a good idea. It allows the most flexibility I've seen outside of a creative commons license.

It's just the BSD license, or a BSD-style license, like what OGG Vorbis is released under.  The problem of course is that you actually need the code that you need in that particular license.  As far as I know there isn't an AVI player that is under a BSD type license so it doesn't really matter which license is better than the next.

A lot of people don't release things like that under a BSD license since you are completely giving your work away.  With GPL/LGPL the code still holds tangible value to the creators since a 3rd party can't just take the code and do whatever they want with it.  With the code under a BSD license someone can take your work, use it however they want, and never you the least bit of credit for it.  They don't even have to tell you that they are using it.  If you work for a year or more on a great bit of code, then someone, legally, takes it and makes 10 million dollars off of it, never giving you so much as a mention... you would be pissed.  If you ever found out about it anyway.  That's why you see code that is GPL and LGPL.  And that's why something like the OGG Vorbis license, which is a BSD-style, requires that you actually give notice that the code is used in the binary (check out the credits screen in FS2_Open for instance, we have to give notice that it's using OGG and JPEG code).

[fizz]

I updated the link in the initial post to a much improved version I basically consider feature-complete now. One remaining issue is that encoding is rather slow. Suggestions on how to improve the situation are very welcome.

If there is interest (and someone can point me at where to get some) I can also offer to take a look at exisiting (AVI) movies and try to transcode them into MVE to get a feeling for how notable the difference (in both quality and size) would be. Due to the aforementioned fact that the encoder is still pretty slow (and my machine isn't quite the speediest, either) I'd like to concentrate on shorter scenes for now. Suggestions?

[karajorma]

You can get all the FS2 movies in avi format from here. Bastion is the smallest if I remember correctly.

[fizz]

You can get all the FS2 movies in avi format from here. Bastion is the smallest if I remember correctly.

Thanks, but reencoding the original movies is a little pointless, isn't it?

[taylor]

Thanks, but reencoding the original movies is a little pointless, isn't it?

Only slightly.


Try Transcend, as it has an end movie in XviD format (I think, does in my mod dir anyway).

[karajorma]

Thanks, but reencoding the original movies is a little pointless, isn't it?

No better test of quality than a side by side comparison

[fizz]

But we pretty much know the result already. The original movies have characteristics that are obviously well-suited for MVE.

I already had a look at the Transcend end movie. Apart from the fact that it is very long, it's also pretty large resolution-wise and most unsuited for MVE because scenes change so damn fast there's not much to gain by comparing to the previous frame. So, that's bascially best case and worst case. I'd like to have an example of something in between. 

[Fury]

Tolwyn brought this topic up as he happened to ask me about mve tools. We all know MVE is poor format compared to newer ones but is the easiest to implement. I think internal MVE support is a good idea to give projects a trouble-free solution for movies that are unsuitable as in-game cutscenes.

But a higher quality alternative would be nice, how much work and trouble it would be to let the operating system and any installed decoders handle movie decoding? This way projects could use whatever video and audio format they want because decoding is done by external decoders that are installed, such as ffdshow and ffmpeg.

[taylor]

But a higher quality alternative would be nice, how much work and trouble it would be to let the operating system and any installed decoders handle movie decoding?

A lot.  Otherwise I would have added code for this already.  Using DirectShow under Windows is a crappy way to do it (as should be obvious by all of the problems everyone has), but it's about the only choice.  We can use QuickTime under OSX (a pretty good solution in fact, can run through OpenGL), but QuickTime doesn't support DivX/XviD natively and the plugins for it cost $$ and generally don't work all that well.  There is no solution like that for Linux, you have to use the decoder directly, and that would most likely be ffmpeg since it's the best overall solution.

ffmpeg has a problem though, it contains tons of unlicensed IP (mp3, mpeg2/4, etc), and there is absolutely no guarantee that the companies who own that IP would leave us alone forever.  Also, ffmpeg contains both LGPL and GPL code, but we can only make use of the LGPL parts since the FS2 source isn't compatible with the GPL.  This means that, at least for the builds which are distributed, we have to use a cut-down lib.  It's not the end of the world, but it's extra work and extra concern to bother with.  And if we stripped out the parts of ffmpeg which give us trouble then it's a lot less useful.

But all of that is really besides the point.  As stated already, we should not even allow people to use any video format they want.  There should be a well defined list, containing at most 2 video codecs (one being MVE), with specific audio format requirements (not mp3), that can be used with the game.  If I was in a pain-in-the-ass mood I'd just rip out DirectShow support, add a mpeg1 decoder that supported all platforms, and be done with it.  And if I was really in a strange mood then I might use RoQ instead, just for kicks.

[Fury]

RoQ, shouldn't it have better quality than MVE?

[taylor]

RoQ, shouldn't it have better quality than MVE?

Quite a bit I imagine.  As fizz pointed out, MVE is a good format, if the movie is right for it.  RoQ is sort of the same thing but more up to date and considerably more advanced, as it should be.  idSoftware made it for the Quake3 series and has kept using it for Doom3 based games too.  I'm not sure how it actually compares to DivX or the like though.  There is a decoder for it (which is basically BSD licensed, though not officially) and several encoders, one from idSoftware and an open source one too.