Hi everyone, I want to distribute an .avi with a game. Sounds easy. Since I play it back myself in software, it needs to be an avi. Is there ANY .avi compatible codec that is generally installed on a user machine which gives good results and does not result in huge filesizes or blocky playback? (I want to use it to play back FMV video). Sure, DivX and Xvid give good compression and small filesizes but the average user (think homeuser) doesn''t have these codecs installed, so I don''t want to use these. All the options, Cinepak, Indeo, Microsoft Video, etc. seem to give bad image quality (blocky) and huge filesizes. Is there anyone who knows a good setting or a good codec for .avi? Or any free, open source easy-to-use codec that I can program in myself? Many thanks! mark

Dont know if this helps you any, but you might try the Microsoft MPEG-4 Video codec. Try googling for more info about it.

You could install the XviD codec on their box with your game... I don''t think it required a reboot for me.

Installing the XVid codec with the game may be an option. (This is actually a Mpeg4 codec anyway, right?). Does anyone know more about this? Which file should be installed where/registered?

I want to explore this as an alternative to say, Bink.

Thanks!

Mark

[edited by - Mark Tanner on September 6, 2003 9:39:37 PM]

I don''t know the exact things you need to do to install it manually, but it probably just involves adding a registry key or putting the .dll or whatever in a particular folder. Install it and go in and registry search.

You might also check on rad tools at http://www.radgametools.com/.

Although this is really a programming question more than a question to ask artists, for something like XVID or DiVX (though I don't know if you could include this for free or w/o the included spyware in the "free" version), the two options I would recommend if you're unhappy w/ the standard AVI formats, Cinepak, Indeo, etc. (did you try sorenson? It's big, but pretty high-quality. Plus, Cinepak can yield acceptable results for a game w/ some tweaking - you shouldn't expect to get really high-quality, artifact-free footage w/ ANY of the codecs), you could always run the XVID Install with your install - using WISE, and possibly even ClickTeam, you could just trigger the install .exe to run at the end of your game install, so you don't have to worry about placing files. If you don't like this options, the files have to go into the OSLocation/system32 directory, OSLocation representing the directory Windows is installed to (this could be win, windows, win32, winnt, winxp, win2000, etc. - you get the idea.). Pretty simple, really, and some of the advanced installers can do this automatically - you tell it what files you want to go to OSLocation/system32, and it automatically fills in the OSLocation variable. A few of the freeware/shareware installers even do this.

To be honest, though, if you're developing shareware software, you really DO NOT want to include an additional codec, and should just use cinepak, the only decent-quality codec that is on every windows based machine (other codecs vary depending on OS version, patch, update, etc. - even if, say, Indeo is in both win98 and winxp, it could be two DIFFERENT versions). Why don't you want to? Well, two reasons: 1) your commons shareware gamer will get scared if you install stuff in that directory, 2) if someone has a previous version of the codec on their computer, your new version could cause incompatibilities w/ their videos/programs which use the old codec, and 3) XVID, for example, has more than one version, and they are not all 100% compatible, and while in theory more than one can exist on a single computer, in practice this doesn't work, and again, causes incompatibilities. Use either Cinepak, Bink or Smacker, which I believe is available for free now, and despite it being limited to 256 colors per movie, it's very high quality, and if you design your pre-rendered scenes correctly, using color palettes that won't really need more than 256c to be represented while in motion (for example, shades of yellow/green/blue will work well together, and if the hues are similar enough, including that in the lighting, you won't be able to tell it's only 256c. Less coloers are also needed when an image is in motion, especially if the motion is fast - see Capcom's later 2D fighters for proof of this).

And one more thing: don't just ask how to do things, or what files to use. This information is explicitly available elsewhere, such as on many of the sites dedicated to the more obscure "hacker" codecs like XVID.

-Nick "digisoap" Robalik
Web & Print Design, 2D & 3D Illustration and Animation, Game Design
http://www.digital-soapbox.com
nick@digital-soabox.com

[edited by - digisoap on September 15, 2003 6:10:19 PM]