The Way Videos: Codec Test

[Kyle]

So, was it like completely white, but you could run it? That's extremely strange... Normally when a codec doesn't work or is missing you'll get an error while opening the file...

[DSOK]

DSOK, this IS the compressed filesize. The uncompressed size is 4 MB for those few seconds. I could use other codecs that make it somewhat smaller (but not that much) but they will lower the quality substantially.

I don't know how you are preparing this file, but I do know that you are making it vastly too large. At this rate, the videos from episode 1 will be larger than the entire game to date.

[Kyle]

Of course it will be bigger than the original game! It's a video, not an engine.

I can't make an exact estimate, but I can give you some facts about what the video size will revolve around:

Uncompressed episode 1 video files: 280 MB
Compressed episode 1 video files: about 130 MB

That's reality. It's worth it in my opinion, the quality is near perfect, unlike my previous video file release (which didn't have any sound).

[Belthazar]

id be willing to download it but is there enough room on the site to hook the movie up to it?

[Shindy]

v NICE, works fine 4 windows player...

but for quicktime... NO.

if ur on 5 already, where are vids for other episodes?

[Kyle]

There's no need to worry about hosting issues. The episodes will be distributed through a bittorrent network. I'm coordinating with Lun and Roman to make it happen.

[Burning_Flame]

Alright I got it working!111 Go me!

[DSOK]

Of course it will be bigger than the original game! It's a video, not an engine.

Do you have no idea what you are talking about?!? All the information needed to produce the video is contained in the game files. There's not some magical reason why, in a video format, the information needs to be so poorly encoded.

The most obvious place you could save would be by more extensive transformation into the temporal frequency domain. However, I imagine that you have no idea how to do this.

[Jabbo]

All the information needed to produce the video is contained in the game files. There's not some magical reason why, in a video format, the information needs to be so poorly encoded.

I don't know much about videos, but I do know it's a lot easier to move pixels and sprites around on a screen than to have a video file. For one, the video has to save the "color matrix" (or whatever it is) for every single frame it displays. In a video game, all that are needed are a few sprites that are saved into "color matrices" for themselves in-game. And since that's, say, one matrix for the background and one matrix for the hero display, that's about the equivalent filesize of two frames of the video (and is actually smaller, since the hero matrix isn't nearly the size of the background). Programs are much more efficient at displaying and animating images than videos are, and it'd be a hell of a lot more filesize-efficient if you just coded the video up in rm2k or c. Unfortunately, that would require much more time and effort and wouldn't really be worth the trouble.

[GaMa]

Hey guys, its me, the first person to get opped in #theway >:D

Yeah, decided to pop on the forums for a sec to check out how things are going, and all of a sudden, I see a video test thing in the main sites news. I was like, "ZOMGWTF".

So yeah, I checked it out, works fine. The video quality is alittle dry and pixelated. The sound... well, can't judge that just from that small clip, since there is no real audio to begin with.

[Dran]

No go for quicktime

[Kyle]

Nope, it won't work with Quicktime... Do you have a mac or something which makes it impossible to use media player? If not, just use media player just this once (in case you hate it, which some people do).

DSOK... I'm sorry to say this but you're making a complete fool of yourself. You have absolutely no idea what a video file contains do you? And don't patronize me thinking I don't know what I'm talking about. I've just finished college, bachelor computer science so I DO know what I'm talking about. I'll make this easy for you.

A game engine has many different functions which can be called by the programmer, which allows them to achieve stuff like making a sprite appear on screen and moving it around. This code needs to be written only once.

A video has no such logic behind it. Each frame needs to be saved and encoded seperately with no relation between frames. It includes data for EACH pixel that needs to be displayed (and the resolution is 320*240). On top of that comes the sound as well. The sound is uncompressed in these videos though to make it easier for people to actually run it without the need of some obscure codec.

But, feel free to make your own "videos" that are 5 MB and use your so called transformations into the temporal frequency domain. I'm sure we'll all be pleased with the result. Until then, I invite people to download mine instead

[Impossible]

You can get Windows Media Player for a Mac... But you can get AVI codecs for QuickTime.

Unfortunately, Kyle beat me to saying that DSOK is full of shit. A game that isn't made by Square-Enix is a bunch of sprites/polygons, pictures and programming. Programming to make the characters do stuff fills up nowhere near as much space as a video of the characters doing that stuff. A video, or a game made by Square-Enix (okay, so other companies use FMV as well, but SE are my all-purpose scapegoat), has to include every frame and pixel.

Edit: Doovy and Co. are mostly gone, so I guess I can change my avatar, since it was there for them anyway (and was actually a picture of Link eating a fairy. >_<). And in celebration of their departure.

[DSOK]

It includes data for EACH pixel that needs to be displayed (and the resolution is 320*240).

This is where you are simply wrong. There are video formats that avoid such a wasteful storage methodology. Believe me or don't.

[Alundra]

da video works just fine ! mooi werk kyle dude! ^_^