[IPAndrews]

Please can someone suggest a good free tool for converting movies of various formats to OGG.

[chief1983]

I think they recommend ffdshow2theora, but I don't know where to get it right now.  Use the Google.

[Wanderer]

Or ffmpeg2theora

[chief1983]

Right that was it, my bad.

[Kazan]

better yet would be a program that i can use to combine an audio track to a video+audio track... existing video is mpeg from what i can tell (Contained in an .avi) with .mp3 audio

[karajorma]

VitualDubMod will do that but it's old.

[Kazan]

virtualdub doesn't support directshow filters so is incapable of decoding the video

[edit]
now it opens it.. crochity bstrd

[edit]
nope... no.. it opened one of them.. but not the combined one that is in divx.. i have dsfilters for divx but no vfw

[Kazan]

does ffmpeg2theora support .avi input (such as a divx file)

[chief1983]

Install the Gordian Knot codec pack, and VDubMod should be able to open almost anything under the sun.  Just don't install the included Divx codec, get one from somewhere else that doesn't have the spamware.

[taylor]

does ffmpeg2theora support .avi input (such as a divx file)

Yes (on Linux at least, but should on Windows too).  It's a bad idea to convert from DivX though, since the quality/compression algorithm results aren't nearly as good as they could be with an uncompressed source.

When doing the conversion for the FS2/FS1 movies I originally tested with a DivX -> Theora conversion and compared that with an MVE -> Uncompressed AVI -> Theora conversion.  Coming from the MVEs gave better results for both quality and final file size.

[WMCoolmon]

ffmpeg can mix and match audio and video tracks via the -map command line option. I'm not familiar with ffmpeg2theora.

[Kazan]

yay for dual booting Fedora Core 7 on a dual core athlon 64

[Kazan]

1 ogg on request http://ferrium.org/media/tbpintro.ogg

[Col. Fishguts]

That's nice, although I don't understand what the credits are doing in the intro. I'm all for credit where credit is due, but your average player isn't interested in seeing a bunch of names each time he starts the game.

[IPAndrews]

So is 3.6.9 release supposed to play ogg movies? I recoded intro.mpg as intro.ogg and now it won't play.

[karajorma]

It should work. What did you use?

[IPAndrews]

ffmpeg2theora

It reduced the mpeg from 90meg to 12meg, and now it won't play. It's named intro.mpg/intro.ogg so it's supposed to fire off every time I start the game engine. This is what happens if you force a stupid poorly supported file format on people.

[chief1983]

Please be careful what you say.  It wasn't a force first of all.  It's really the only option.  Theora is a free to use, non-GPL protected format, and it isn't all that poorly supported.  It's just not as big as Xvid because no one uses it to make illegal movie rips.  The move is to ensure a free, non-license violating codebase is used for movie support, as opposed to the proprietary one used to play the MVE files.  It's even more poorly supported than Theora is, since it's only in a handful of games.  Most people seem to be able to get theora converting to work ok, so odds are something was done wrong at some step.  I'd doublecheck what was done to convert it, and maybe post a few more details here so someone can offer some more insight.

[taylor]

If you use a debug build then it will spit out into the log any errors that make it not play a movie.  But, all movies must be 640x480 or smaller, and you must be using OpenGL, in order for them to play.  I'd bet you have an issue with one of those two things.

[Col. Fishguts]

But, all movies must be 640x480 or smaller. *snip*

How come ? Performance reasons ?