[Scummvm-devel] BS2 cutscenes

[J.Brown (Ender)]

> First off: Merry Christmas, folks (to those of you who are concerned
> with such things :-)

Ditto :)

> Now, is actually any work being done on this??? From my POV, people
> have been talking about this for a couple months now, but nobody has
> actually *done* anything. If nobody simply implements it, I fear we'll
> not be ready for release by eastern, or next christmas, either....

I have been working on it, but there have been problems I'll get into
below.

> 1) Are we set on MPEG2? Or is there still need for discussion of the
> video format (if so, what realistic alternatives are there? Remember,
> we need a portable playback library for it)

MPEG2 is realisticly the smallest (whether internal or external) in terms
of playback code, and gives us a reasonably good compression rate given
the quality of the source material. Also libmpeg2 is very portable and
fairly CPU friendly allowing for decent playback on embedded devices. So
that's why I've been moving forward with this format. I did enquire some
time ago as to whether anybody had any other suggestions, but nobody
really did.

> 2) If so, did somebody already convert the videos to MPEG2?

I've been working on it when I can, unfortunatly MPEG2 is limited to
certain fixed framerates - none of which easily match the framerate in the
smackers, causing sound syncro issues.

 > 3) Do we have permission to re-distribute the re-encoded movies?

Yes, we have ever since we got the BS1/BS2 code as Revolution knew
smacker would be a problem then.

> 4) If yes, how do we plan to distribute them? If no, we should make a
> doc for users on how they can convert the movies by themselves.

That's a pending issue. My latest tests gave a rough filesize of 30-40MB
for all the cutscenes in BS2. This could probably be lowered to 25 or so
with sufficent quality tweaks (as the source material isn't the best, we
can easily sacrifice video quality with little actual visible degrading).
Where we host it is another matter... I can probably get it mirrored at
various places (Planetmirror, et-al), but the cutscenes actually need to
be done first. Similar work needs to happen to BS1.

There is a localisation issue with BS1 cutscenes, as unlike BS2 the
smack's also contain voiceover. For now I'm just ignoring that.

> I think we should move this forward aggressively now. From my POV I
> don't quite see why we couldn't have settled all of this one month ago
> (lack of drive apparently was what caused this delay, apparently? :-)

Well, on MY side of things yes :) I don't have the space to do it at home,
so I have to work on it in my free time at work. I was hoping somebody
would have worked on this months ago, but nobody else has.

I agree it's a bit of a priority issue, expecially as I would like to get
0.6.0 ASAP.

 - Ender