2 Questions about Sound and Video

[Powzone]

Now that I got hell of a time to give something back to all of you, I got these 2 questions:

1. We all know that comparing the sound between 1.10 and 2.2.1, it got worse. My thoughts are wheter it's OpenAL engine or the converted files. In the case of the engine, I can't contribute. But if it's about mastering the original sound files, I can help for sure! What is exactly the problem?

2. Some people complained about the bad quality of the converted FMVs. There are truly other formats, they could be converted into, but better quality equals always bigger size. Nowadays more size shouldn't be any problem. If the FMVs would eat up something around 500MB (just not to say 1GB), the quality would be alot better. The bigger problem is the source, I think. Is there any other source of the FMVs except ripping them from the retail versions?
(BTW I have both German and English retail versions, so I could rip them outta there!)

[Thyranim]

for the videos take a look here

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3384

[cybersphinx]

1. We all know that comparing the sound between 1.10 and 2.2.1, it got worse.

Define "worse". Unless you can hear Vorbis artifacts, it's the engine.

2. Some people complained about the bad quality of the converted FMVs. There are truly other formats, they could be converted into, but better quality equals always bigger size. Nowadays more size shouldn't be any problem. If the FMVs would eat up something around 500MB (just not to say 1GB), the quality would be alot better. The bigger problem is the source, I think. Is there any other source of the FMVs except ripping them from the retail versions?
(BTW I have both German and English retail versions, so I could rip them outta there!)

See the thread Thyranim linked. The problem was mainly a too low quality setting, Theora itself isn't that bad (especially the newer encoders). The German videos are available at http://warzone2100.de.

[fisk0]

I wouldn't say I agree with the statement that sounds gotten worse since the retail version.
Yeah, they were for a while (like in 2.1 when the VTOL sound would hang and keep looping through the entire game, even when there were no VTOL's nearby), but I haven't noticed any such obvious problems in more recent versions.
One thing I can agree on is that the sound isn't good - but that is mainly because the standards are higher nowadays than in 1999, and Warzone 2100 had no revolutionary sound engine back then either. As far as I can tell the only thing it does is to play the sounds in the right or left speaker depending on the direction the sound is coming from, and playing it louder or weaker depending on the distance. Modern games use much more complicated sound effects, like doppler shifting, to make the pitch of a sound rise if it's getting closer, or lower of it's moving away, and making distant sounds (like explosions and gun fire) a lot more muffled. Some of that stuff was pretty common even back in 1998 (Total Annihilation and StarCraft had the muffled distant explosions, I think TA either did it through some advanced sound code or several different sound files used depending on distance, while StarCraft used two sound files, one for on screen/close stuff and one for off screen/distant stuff).
And I think the retail version of Warzone 2100 had some sound problems too, though not as annoying as the early 2.x VTOL loop bug.

[Powzone]

What I refer to is, the sound got "muffled" somehow. Maybe a bit more "air", that means lifting the higher frequencies, could solve that. As for the sound engine, I can't do nothing about it...
I will try some things reencoding from the original .WAV files. I'll report later...

The video trascoding/reencoding seems to be a bit more complicated, but I'll try my best. I got Sony Vegas and maybe it can do the trick. Limiting the kbps for the audio and video streams should be important. So what are the rates to use?

[cybersphinx]

What I refer to is, the sound got "muffled" somehow. Maybe a bit more "air", that means lifting the higher frequencies, could solve that. As for the sound engine, I can't do nothing about it...
I will try some things reencoding from the original .WAV files. I'll report later...

Hm, maybe that's the compression, or the low sampling rate of the sounds (8 or 11 kHz iirc).

The video trascoding/reencoding seems to be a bit more complicated, but I'll try my best. I got Sony Vegas and maybe it can do the trick. Limiting the kbps for the audio and video streams should be important. So what are the rates to use?

Hint: the linked thread has a second page.

[Powzone]

Hint: the linked thread has a second page.

I know... Nobody told the original rates except for the 2000bps limit video rate.