playing HD video

[lafouine88]

Hey guys
I'm facing problems with my intro and ending cinematic. Both of them are pretty heavy since I used good video quality (made with adobe suite).

The first one was around 150Mb in mpeg, then converted to 45Mb in OGV (using Xmediarecode)
Second one 720Mb converted to 120 Mb

Problem is, even with the ogv compression it still seems to be to much for the engine to display it properly. It actually works fine on my computer (which is a recent one) but on an older one it freezes and slows down a lot. Which is a problem because my 320*200 game is supposed to be working on any lousy computer.

Any hints? I tried to use ffmpeg2theora but it doesn't seem to work anymore(unless I didn't understand how it's supposed to work). Are there CODECS that need to be installed that I don't know about ?Any other idea?
Or do I have to reduce the quality of the video ? In which case, what would be an acceptable size for the video to play without problems ?

Thanks in advance for your help, my deadline is friday night and I'm a bit worried about this cinematic ruining the whole first impression :s

[LimpingFish]

Are they the same resolution as the game? A 320x200 video, compressed, should have a relatively tiny file size.

[lafouine88]

Hi. Résolutionid 1920*1080. As i said,i did the video on adobe so it's quite high quality,abd even with h264 compression it's a heavy file.

[morganw]

Are you saying that it is your intention to have a 1920x1080 video playing in your game or do you mean that you cannot find a way to down-scale it to 320x200? I'm not sure what the engine does when the video resolution doesn't match the game resolution but if the video is being down-scaled as it plays that might create some additional overhead.

[Hobbes]

Agreed, further to that, at such a high compression rate (plus intensive codec like h264), it probably needs a beefy processor to play back smoothly. So actually a smaller video file might be detrimental if you intend to stick with 1080p. For example, the h265 codec produces smaller files than the h264 codec without quality degradation, but needs significantly more processing power to allow for smooth playback.

Further to that, I think 1080p h264 codec would struggle on any older PC, so I think your best best is to not use HD video if you intend to play the game on older machines. Rendering the video to the game resolution seems to be your best bet here?

[Crimson Wizard]

To clarify, the AGS currently plays video in native game resolution. This means that if the game is 320x200, then the video will be played in a 320x200 box.
If the PlayVideo option is "play in original size", then the larger video will be simply offscreen and you see only central 320x200 part of it.
If the option is "resize to full screen", then the larger video will be downscaled to 320x200; which means there's extra work (not necessarily a problem with OpenGL/Direct3D renderers), but more importantly also that high resolution quality will be lost.

In any case this means there's no sense at all in having a HD video in the low-res game.

[lafouine88]

Ok thanks everybody.
It's weird what you say crimson because as i said earlier the hd vid full screen video does work, but it's smooth only on a good computer.
But I ll try to downgrade the quality a bit and see if it's more acceptable.

By the way,can you confirm that ffmpegtheora doesnt work anymore? I would have liked to try converting with it.

[Crimson Wizard]

It's weird what you say crimson because as i said earlier the hd vid full screen video does work

Ah. I found it's actually working in high-res if you enable "Render sprites in screen resolution" mode.