Fallout 2 mod Converting video to mve

[Lexx]

Yeah, the old pain.

I'm using the ages old avi2mve.exe and it isn't really working out well. In my first tests I was able to convert a 640x480px video - the sound plays ingame, but no visible video. Another issue is that avi2.mve only supports video resolutions of 640x480px, which is really shitty.

Anyone knows of a more "up to date" software? Also, is it possible to make videos in a higher resolution than 640x480px? I think Fallout Nevada uses widescreen stuff, so in theory it should be?

Any help in this area would be great.

 

[gustarballs1983]

the only solution I'm aware of is that recent Sfall versions can be told to look for alternative video formats like .avi. I'm afraid as far as it goes for .mve it's a technological dead end. So all in all I'd rather consult Mr.Stalin and NovaRain for .avi support in sfall, instead of searching for a *holy hand granade* err.. *.mve support, If I were You :p

 

[Lexx]

I think so too, but then it again becomes a matter of "is it really worth it?"

For now I have all Fo1 and 2 videos in a x4 resolution with ai-touch and denoise to get a few details out of it (took me 3 or 4 days to render...). With that it's now possible to resize them back to twice their original size, which - imo - gives pretty good results considering the low-res sources.

As example, here is the Cathedral explosion (original) and the V13 overrun sequence (original) in untouched upscale (honestly, the Fo1 videos look the best upscaled, the Fo2 videos barely make a difference).

Anyways. As said before, you can't really make something low-res suddenly look hi-res, just fake it till you make it up to maybe double the original resolution. It's really just a matter of if it's really worth putting it into the game...

 

[gustarballs1983]

Lexx I really wouldn't bother..
I downloaded both videos (as you tube uses AI improoved upscaling and hardware acceleration -in browser- for video playback) and frankly the original 240p Cathedral video looks almost the same quality as Your vid. Although i'm not quite sure weather my installed video player or codecs do not hardware improove image quality as well, (at least i know my Radeon RX 390X does that it out of the box), however the video quality in game is far worse than both videos i downloaded from yt, the one claiming to be original and Yours.

Anyways i think the original videos are not 480p but rather 240p ( as in 320x240 ) because wether you realise it or not GPU's of thgat time (90's) would probably never be able to handle a true 480p video. I still have problems for example playing a HD-Ready 720p video on a laptop from 2006. it's the last 10 years that made such drastic improovement in video resolution. my phone from 2005 (called a cell phone a predecessor to smartphones) barely could do pictures 640x480 and did not have video recording at all. frankly if we're looking in video playback resolution-wise than it's mostly last 10 years. at least from My perspective.

Edit:
As a side note..
MVE is a interplay propertiary video encoding format.. so how else besides russian hardcore hacker & hell-bent old gamer, would you expect an upgrade to a codec from a dead company?

 

[Gizmojunk]

...because wether you realise it or not GPU's of thgat time (90's) would probably never be able to handle a true 480p video.

What GPU?

Fallout ran on a Pentium 90MHz with SVGA video. The GeForce 256 came out two years after Fallout.

@topic ~ish

What did Beamdog use? (for video encoding)

 

[Lexx]

Well, youtube did their own compression on the video. If I compare the original and the resized version that I have sitting on my hdd, I see a pretty clear difference. Some more, others less. If the difference makes it better or worse is another question.

The Fo1 native video resolution is 432x320px. The Fo2 videos are in 640x320px (widescreen). As noted before, *.mve apparently supports up to 640x480px, so it would be possible to at least upscale the Fo1 videos. What could be achieved with this is... somewhat sharper images, I guess.

 

[gustarballs1983]

What GPU?

Fallout ran on a Pentium 90MHz with SVGA video. The GeForce 256 came out two years after Fallout.

@topic ~ish

What did Beamdog use? (for video encoding)

Where Have I said that when fallout came out there were non embeded graphic devices?
All I ment was SVGA is not exactly a thing to run 480p videos. Hence why most vodeos of the time were 240p .

Maybe it's a noob question but..
Who's Beamdog?

all i ment on .mve was this:

https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/Interplay_MVE

 

[Gizmojunk]

Beamdog did the Baldur's Gate remasters. Baldur's Gate used MVE videos, and so must have had encoders for it.

**I have since checked and it seems that Beamdog switched to WebM format for their videos in the remastered edition.

 

[gustarballs1983]

I plowed through google myself, researching this topic.
As it turns out .mve is propertiary system of Interplay and all tools for .mve that are present on the internet are based on reverse engineering, and not on anything that came out of Interplay itself (i.e. opensourced). Henceforth my statement still stands true, it would be far easier to ask somebody with skills like NovaRain or Mr.Stalin, to have a look at the matter, than wait for the resurrection of Interplay and have them cough-up anything. Fo:Nevada had custom .mve cinematics that did have far better resolution than the vanilla ones, so that is why skilled hacker is a waaay better place to look for this.

 

[Lexx]

Nevada's video size is 640x480px, which is the maximum size for *.mve files, like I said above. :>

 

[burn]

The format is pretty well detailed here https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/Interplay_MVE. I don't see any obvious resolution limits.
Also, TeamX site has some utils (not converters) with sources. So writing a tool for conversion is just a matter of will.
However, even if format itself doesn't limit resolution (of which I'm not sure), there's no guarantee that engine implementation would support it. So at this point, I think the best way would be to request alternative video format support in sfall. I'd even leave out AVI and look into something more modern/open - maybe the mentioned WEBM. There should be plenty of open source libraries for that.

 

[Lexx]

That's all outside of my skill range, and I wasn't even able to correctly convert videos to run in 640px without issues. So from my side it's pretty much dead.

 

[burn]

That's all outside of my skill range, and I wasn't even able to correctly convert videos to run in 640px without issues. So from my side it's pretty much dead.

Maybe I was unclear. What I mean is that I'd ask sfall devs to support an alternative media format. Not sure how much work that would be, but hey, no harm in asking.

 

[Mr.Stalin]

Maybe I was unclear. What I mean is that I'd ask sfall devs to support an alternative media format. Not sure how much work that would be, but hey, no harm in asking.

Avi вполне нормальный медиа-контейнер.
На gitgub есть dev ветка в которой avi уже воиспроизводится для оконного режима игры, осталость решить проблему воспроизведения в полноэкранном, к сожалению моих знаний в кухне directX пока недостаточно чтобы это решить.

 

[burn]

Avi вполне нормальный медиа-контейнер.
На gitgub есть dev ветка в которой avi уже воиспроизводится для оконного режима игры, осталость решить проблему воспроизведения в полноэкранном, к сожалению моих знаний в кухне directX пока недостаточно чтобы это решить.

Ну как сказать, да, нормальный, не считая того, что он проприетарный и лишь немного младше меня.
Вообще, конечно, поддержка популярных форматов это хорошо, но конкретно в этом случае тащить багаж из прошлого тысячелетия смысла я не вижу. Сейчас есть и форматы свободные, и кодеки, и библиотеки для их поддержки, и все это качественнее и проще в использовании. Даже в лохматых двухтысячных уже все любительские видео переходили на mkv/mp4.
Ну это так, мое мнение.

 

[Mr.Stalin]

Вообще, конечно, поддержка популярных форматов это хорошо, но конкретно в этом случае тащить багаж из прошлого тысячелетия смысла я не вижу. Сейчас есть и форматы свободные, и кодеки, и библиотеки для их поддержки, и все это качественнее и проще в использовании. Даже в лохматых двухтысячных уже все любительские видео переходили на mkv/mp4.
Ну это так, мое мнение.

Не ну найди человека которык вошьет это (кодеки) в sfall.
Avi может содержать старые и новые кодеки, главное что бы в системе стоял кодек, а DrectShow сделает все сам. Правда DirectShow считается устаревшим, и не кроссплатформенным.

 

[Magnus]

Somewhat off topic, but I've been toying around with making a video for finding the car in Fallout 2 based on clips from this:

I want it to look old and 16 bit like the other movies in the game, is there anyone who is a master of this that I can talk to once I finish the video?