AGS: The Cabin: videos are unsupported

[webangel3]

Hello,
The Cabin (AGS) gets an error while start new game.

[tag2015]

The error message is caused by the opening video, which uses an unsupported codec.
If you want to see it anyway, you should be able to play it with VLC or similar

[i30817]

In Ags, if the video is external (they often are to playback using windows media DLLs in windows, original), you can usually convert them into a video format that 'modern' Ags understands and can play (like theora), just by converting and using the same filename.

I don't remember if you need to change extension if the file has it could go either way programmatically.

[i30817]

I know this because the game Donna Avenger of Blood has the same exact intro video problem and I solved it by converting the video to something else with ffmpeg. It wasnt even a good video to add insult to it.

But I also bugged scummvm\ags devs to make the missing videos just a warning instead of the crash they were before. In some games (again like Donna) you almost won't even notice now).

[i30817]

It could be worse, some games videos play but are extremely slow, like Ags bastille game which has a 12mb off intro that skips, stutters and desyncs like it was trying to play in a amiga 1200.

[i30817]

(deleted outdated info).

[i30817]

(deleted outdated info)

[i30817]

(deleted outdated info)

[i30817]

(deleted outdated info)

[i30817]

Iin upstream (agsplayer) the video plays zoomed in after a naive conversion. I guess I understand, in the absence of a resolution adjustment for the game ( I tend to delete the acsetup of games I have and replace it by a standard one with minimal settings, but the settings of the original don't actually affect the video here), it's not surprising that the video appears zoomed\boxed in - it's a 1080x1920 video trying to play on a 320x200 or whatever is the default resolution for the given game.

In scummvm it can't find the file, converted or not.

[i30817]

(deleted outdated\duplicate info)

[i30817]

for vid in data*.dat; do ffmpeg -i "$vid" -c:v libtheora -q:v 10 -c:a libvorbis -q:a 10 -vf "scale=640:360" "$vid".ogv && rm "$vid" && mv "$vid".ogv "$vid"; done

gave me the best results in agsplayer. There is still a slight jump in the transition from video to room but it kind of makes sense

the original acsetup has 1080x1920 a 16:9 resolution. The minimal 16:9 resolution is 640x360, so this tracks if the author expected a scaler to upscale their main game to 1080x1920 or downscale the video file to the 640x360 of backgrounds (which btw since the game has a main menu warning to play in windowed mode probably didn't work in Fullscreen... and probably shouldn't work if this was never fixed). I didn't test other than the intro movie (character waking up) so no guarantees.

I still think it's kind of weird that the engine doesn't auto resize movies but whatever, the real important problem is scummvm not finding the video files (in a subdir? Because they have no video format extension? No clue).

Oh right this game has a unrelated usability annoyance: it's controlled by both the mouse and keyboard, which means it's slightly annoying in android with the virtual keyboard open at all times, like Graceward and Stormwater, only while those games use the arrow keys for continuous 3rd person movement and the mouse for shooting and interaction, this uses the keyboard for first person movement so it's less frantic\problematic and just annoying because of the overlay.