mpeg video playback coming to a Linux AGS port near you

Started by EvilTypeGuy, Wed 03/08/2005 06:13:56

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EvilTypeGuy

Wed 03/08/2005 06:13:56
I've finally found a video playback library with a "friendly" license that works with Allegro (heck, it was written for Allegro!). ( http://kcat.strangesoft.net/ )

A version of the various AGS binaries is tentatively scheduled for the end of August with video playback support. It could be earlier, but I need to allow time for testing / debugging.

I got KQ2VGA's Intro Video to playback in AGS for the first time tonight with sound and everything under the new-but-yet-to-be-released Solaris 10 port of AGS.

So to all of those who keep emailing me and begging me for video playback or posting here, your cries have not gone unheard. I just didn't have a good way to do it until now without writing my own video playback library (not something I relished the thought of doing nor had time to do so).

Technical gibberish follows:
However, the new video playback library has symbols that conflict with almp3, the mpeg3 playback library that AGS already uses. This causes random crashes. I'm going to have to edit the entire library's internal symbol list by adding prefixes to the function names so that it won't randomly crash. That's going to take some time and a lot of debugging / testing, hence the release date at the end of this month.

Gilbert

#1
Wed 03/08/2005 06:47:02
I wonder, if CJ would kindly add this library to the main ports of AGS as well, that way, we can have some of the video playbacks that's handled internally, so we are now free of the possible unfixable problems in some computers when we need to say, pass the control to some external crap called DirectPlay (of course, formats not supported internally by the engine still need DirectPlay). Better yet, if we poke CJ hard enough, he'll bring the DOS engine back to life, with MPEG movie playback support!

scotch

#2
Wed 03/08/2005 12:16:06
Gil, that's why I suggested Ogg Theora support to him, it is a good choice because it's under a totally free license, has no patent encumberances (like mpeg does), and is a modern codec aimed at competing with divx/xvid for compression quality.
But in addition to that, internal mpeg decoding might be nice for those wanting a less CPU intensive codec, for slower machines.
Nice to see some progress on the ports.

Pumaman

#3
Wed 03/08/2005 18:06:04
Good stuff Shawn :)

I looked into APEG a while back with a view to using it for OGG Theora support, but at the time I didn't quite cotton onto the fact that it might also be handy for MPEG support in the non-Windows ports.

I can see the advantage of having some internal video support that doesn't rely on DirectShow, so it might be worth implementing into the Windows version too at some point.

simulacra

#4
Fri 19/08/2005 19:21:44
MPEG support for linux would be sooo nice! Good work!

EvilTypeGuy

#5
Sun 21/08/2005 01:31:09
Well, I just finished testing video playback today. There are only two caveats to it:

* It only supports basic mpeg video (not mpeg-4 mpeg-2, etc.)

* It won't scale or center the video on screen during playback - meaning if the game is running at a higher resolution than the video you will see a black border, and the video won't be centered.

Other than that, it appears to work without issue. I'll be releasing a new Linux binary soon with support for it. As well as backporting the video playback to my 2.56 releases so vide playback will work for Tierra Game releases.

simulacra

#6
Mon 22/08/2005 14:37:39
Great news! This means that Linux won't miss out on the ~ 15 min of video in the Zone!
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