FLI/FLC quality and filesize

[Jay]

A few questions:
1 - How large are FLI/FLCs usually? I converted a video to FLC (using Jasc Animation Shop, because that's the only software I have for FLCs). It came out to be about 15 mb, for just a seven second video. That can't be normal, is there any other software anybody can recommend? (I googled it but I didn't find much that converts to flic)
2 - Also, I was wondering about the quality. I read somewhere that you can only have 256 colors in a FLIC. Is this true? My game is high color, I don't want the flic to look much different from the game.

I'm not so eager to use FLIC, but it seems to be the only way to compile videos directly into the game's .exe file, am I right? My game will have a different ending depending on what score you get, and I don't want it to be easy as double-clicking the file in the compiled folder to view it if I used .avi.

[Gilbert]

1. Unfortunately, it's quite normal that a flic would be large, especially for more "complicated" stuffs like photorealistic movies and having dynamic changes, as it used only RLE compression for it's frames. If you lower the frame rate (ie use less frames) I think the file size can be decreased.
2. Yes, basically the quality will be related to the converter you use, I think some of them might do a good job in colour reduction (using dithering, etc.) so the movie can have better quality, some may not.

I think if you're concerned much about the size and quality of movies you can use AVIs or MPEG instead (Look for PlayVideo(), etc. from the manual), the bad thing about AVIs was that you must ensure the players had installed the appropiate codecs, I think MPEG1 is a safe format for compatibility, size and quality. Unfortunately if your game use PlayVideo(), it only works on the windows engine.