avi playing, music stuttering (BUG?)

[Iago]

When I have an mp3 track as background music and I want to have a video played with audio muted (so only gamesound is playing) the background music stutters heavily during the playback of the video.
I tried saveral Codecs. (mpg4, divx, cinepak)

There seems to be a relationship between the movement in the video and the stuttering of the music:
Only when there is no movement in the video, the music is looping (stuttering) a piece of about one second.

I figured out what this could be:
When there's no motion in the video, the codec sends a loop-this-frame-until-there's-motion-again command to the video player.
unfortunatelly, the music playing part of AGS feels adressed, too and also starts looping.

So there wouldn't be any prolem, if my avi would be a normal 24 fps recording. Unfortunatelly it's a 10 fps video, and it is animated, so there are a lot of parts in which there's absolutely no motion.


I would be glad if anyone whould tell me what to do to solve the problem.

[Pumaman]

I believe that DirectShow only returns control to AGS after each frame has been displayed, so if you have a low frame rate coupled with multi-frame frames, it may not be possible to fix this.

[strazer]

Since you don't need sound anyway, have you considered using FLC instead?

[Gilbert]

Well depends on one's need, as FLC supports 256 colours only, and it can be relatively large in file size as it used only RLE compressions.
On the other hand FLC is good because it's internally supported by AGS, so it:
1. Works for all ports, including the DOS port.
2. Doesn't need to call external system components (M$ Direct show ), which can have different problems on different computers (due to different system setups and codecs/drivers/etc. installed).

[Iago]

I'll try FLC.

Thanks for the answers.

[Iago]

would it help, if I use another audio format?
I know that midi isn't problematic in this concerns, what about ogg? and others?

[Gilbert]

I think this depends on the (player's) computer's settings, since when playing an AVI AGS is launching something not controlled by the engine.
Also, as you said the sound was muted in the AVI, does that mean that the file has a sound channel but with no sound? Or the movie doesn't have a sound channel at all? Because if the AVI has a sound channel I think DirectPlay will also initialize sound (even though it's playing silence) which can also interferer which what's originally playing.

[Iago]

I didm't put any sound into the avi. So I think there's no sound channel. I chose the "mute avi audio" tag in order to have the game music continue playing.

[Gilbert]

I think that depends on the programme which generates it.
Try double clicking the AVI and play it with Media Player, if the volume slider and sound mute checkbox are grayed out then the file doesn't contain a sound channel, otherwise it still contains sound (even though it's silence).