Warzone 2100 Forums

Heya.

gerard_ wrote: Yeah! I got ogg/theora playback working inside Warzone
It is really alpha stage, but already looks really fancy.

Those movies look even cooler when you watch them from within Warzone!

Hatsjoe: Could you create ogg/theora/vorbis movies from these?

It would also be really nice to have a warzone logo movie, that we can show just after you start the game.

Lol that's fast :p Where can i finf the codec's?  I' m using virtualdub to compress the lose frames into videofiles. I could also send you all the lose frames so you can create them yourself. this way you can decide what works best inside warzone. The lose frames come in at about 11 MB / movie @ 640*480. If you prefer i compress them what size and resolution do you want them to be ? I'll start right away when i receive your answer Maybe we will convince some more people to really do something for the recreation of the movies. Would be cool.

Hatsjoe wrote: Lol that's fast :p Where can i find the codec's?  I' m using virtualdub to compress the lose frames into videofiles. I could also send you all the lose frames so you can create them yourself. this way you can decide what works best inside warzone. The lose frames come in at about 11 MB / movie @ 640*480. If you prefer i compress them what size and resolution do you want them to be ? I'll start right away when i receive your answer Maybe we will convince some more people to really do something for the recreation of the movies. Would be cool.

I got good results using ffmpeg2theora: http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/
But you could also take a look at VirtualDubMod: http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/

And what size and resolution.... I think 640x480 is a nice goal. We could even make different movie packs available that would have movies of different sizes and qualities.
I suggest that you just experiment a little with the quality settings, I have no idea how large a good quality ogg/theora file should be.

Hatsjoe, i can offer you a small FTP-account at wz2100.net.
(Btw, i start to work on a small contribution system soon )

Kamaze wrote: Hatsjoe, i can offer you a small FTP-account at wz2100.net.
(Btw, i start to work on a small contribution system soon )

I appreciate the offer and i will make full use of it as soon as the project starts to get serious. I m still going to do some research on public opinions and developers opinions about the movies before really starting to work in the "storyline telling FMV's" and if everything goes as planned, And if i can get the nessecery people together, the FTP will come in very usefull. But since now the data trafic goes between only a few people, i can just as easily use e-mail and Chojun's webspace . As long as Chojun wants to keep hosting the files offcourse. I can hardly wait to see the movies in warzone. :p

What exactly do you mean by setting up a contribution system ?

A map, mod... uploading, listing, commenting etc... system.
Planned for the next revision of the website.

Kamaze wrote: A map, mod... uploading, listing, commenting etc... system.
Planned for the next revision of the website.

I see :p

gerard_ wrote: I got good results using ffmpeg2theora: http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/
But you could also take a look at VirtualDubMod: http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/

And what size and resolution.... I think 640x480 is a nice goal. We could even make different movie packs available that would have movies of different sizes and qualities.
I suggest that you just experiment a little with the quality settings, I have no idea how large a good quality ogg/theora file should be.

Hmm, i ran into trouble with the codecs :s ffmpeg2theora doesn't seem to work on my computer so i tried the virtualdubmod. The NEXUS movie converted just fine but the JNew paradigm thingie keeps crashing virtualdub over and over again :s

It runs fine in Wine... You know that it is not a GUI application, but a command line program?
Usage is actually extremely simple "ffmpeg2theora X:\Path\To\Movie.ext" and you'll get a "X:\Path\To\Movie.ogg" file.

DevUrandom wrote: It runs fine in Wine... You know that it is not a GUI application, but a command line program?
Usage is actually extremely simple "ffmpeg2theora X:\Path\To\Movie.ext" and you'll get a "X:\Path\To\Movie.ogg" file.

Yes i know, but when i start the program a command window pops up and shuts down before i can eve read what it says. I'm gonna try using virtual dub but it seems i can only save the file in .AVI or .OGM formats. But since the used codec is the same i suppose they will  be compatible with the warzone ogg player? I'll keep trying

It would also be really nice to have a warzone logo movie, that we can show just after you start the game.

http://krossfire.net.ru/index.php?do=do ... file&id=70 -may be to put this ? if GLP allow.

Hatsjoe wrote: Yes i know, but when i start the program a command window pops up and shuts down before i can eve read what it says. I'm gonna try using virtual dub but it seems i can only save the file in .AVI or .OGM formats. But since the used codec is the same i suppose they will  be compatible with the warzone ogg player? I'll keep trying

I think the .ogm is just another extension for .ogg, to denote that it contains a movie. My current video code can only read og[gm]/theora files and not avi/theora.

You can just drag and drop a file on the ffmpeg2theora exe to convert it. Also the command prompt might come in handy. You can find a gentle introduction here: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1723

If you dislike typing white text into black screens, maybe SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html) is useful. It uses ffmpeg2theora, but has a windows interface. (note: did not try it myself)

gerard_ wrote: My current video code can only read og[gm]/theora files and not avi/theora.

And in my very humble opinion it should stay like that. Converting WZ into a multimedia center is probably not the best way to go. More dependencies and increased code complexity would be not so nice. (Just in case you wanted to spend time thinking about it.)

(I even thought about droping mp3 and jpg support if possible to reduce deps and complexity...)

dev's words are wise... warzone is already has some messy code, and we'd do well not to add any features like multimedia file support until someone actually has a legitimate need: for that, ogg theora will do -- just because someone *might* want to use wmv, or might want to use mov formats doesn't mean we should add support (especially since they're highly proprietary formats), and beyond that, avi/theora is something of a awkwardness since it is already very well known that avi doesn't directly support vorbis streams, and any implementations that are able to achieve that are hacks. with theora, we can encode multiple audio streams (for multilanguage support) as well as multi subtitle streams within the same ogg, and even multiple video streams (though i don't know why we'd want to do that) -- granted, doing each of these takes a extra work on the developer side, but the overhead mostly deals with getting text subtitles and audio to work in the first place, and the ogg api should make choosing any given stream of its type trivial

beyond that, if you're sacrificing time to make a mod, it's generally assumed that you're also sacrificing whatever formats you have on hand for whatever for. i haven't looked into it, but it seems that the defacto standard for texture formats in warzone is png: jpeg definitely has much better compression for these kinds of files (textures that try to appear photorealistic), but is, of course, lossy -- to get an effectively lossless jpeg, you're looking at about the same file size as you're getting with the png's, and while many arguments (including file size) support jpeg, there is one main problem with them: at various levels of compression, the pixels in jpeg's begin to "bleed" together, and can often visually corrupt an adjacent texture within the image that's used on an unrelated polygon, or used for a different team color -- this can get especially noticable when a 4x12 texture is stretched across a polygon that is rendered as 280x8 on screen (based on view perspective). the maximum quality settings for lossy jpeg variants tend to remove pixel bleed altogether, but then have nearly the same file size of their png equivalents, and have lower color accuracy as well.

mp3, while the flagship format of many user's music collections, is of poor quality in all but the low frequency (bass) ranges, and is still patent encumbered, and technically i think we'd have to pay licensing fees to use it (though i'm pretty sure there's never been any enforcement of this against open source projects). either way, it seems that those who heavily use mp3 files (windows users) tend to be happy enough running an external player in the background, while mac users often scorn mp3 and use mp4 instead, in which case, for their music, they'd probably be running an external player as well. linux (and other free os) users often either embrace open codecs, or are at least aware of their existence, and are probably not adverse to using ogg vorbis. imo, if we're ever going to drop support for either jpeg's or mp3's, or convert to either of those exclusively, we should do so before we have officially introduced replacements for all the movies, as that would be the first time when the gpl'd version of the game is equal to or surpassing the original in every way, and would quite possibly increase the number of players greatly (i've got one friend who's waiting until it has movies before trying warzone at all).

also, with ffmpeg2theora, i'd recommend that you use an uncompressed video as the source, as quality could go *way* down if you convert from one compression format to another with radically different compression techniques.

Because kage mentioned it:
It may be good if the sequence definition files would support something like this: (If ogg supports subtitles, like kage said.)
Syntax is of course just an example.
wzsub would probably be similar to the format the current subtitles are in. (Or maybe not offered at all, if getting a subtitle-ogg is easy enough.)
The benefit of this would be that one could mod eg. only the subtitles (translation mods) or only the video (high-res-video mods).
If we don't intend to support such kind of partly mods (in opposite to replacing the whole video bundle (audio,video,subtitles)), I vote for reducing the effort as much as possible to only support oggs containing all of audio,video,subtitles.
Of course I am eagerly awaiting your opinions on this idea...