Playing Video Clips (MPEG, AVI) In-game?

[legacy-JamesWalkoski]

While modding UT2003 is it possible to play full motion video clips? Fullscreen while nothing else is happening and then loading a new level is fine.

I know the engine has this capability, but I would like to know if it can be used through uscript in UT2003.

Animated textures are not acceptable.

[elmuerte]

afaik UT2003 doesn't ship with the support to play video files

I know kicking old threads is a bad thing... but I actually have the exact same question. Is it possible the play movie clips within unreal (a mov or an avi for example). And i don't mean a matinee movie, but an actual real movie.

If unreal hasn't got this support, is it possible to run an external video program next to unreal and just control the external program with unreal.

I want to do this because I want to ad an intro, outro and cut-scene's to my game.

Thnx

[legacy-krm197]

You can do almost any kind of communication between unreal and an external source through networking. Unreal has a pretty good tcp/ip and udp support system, so if you developed something in c++ that could communicate with unrealscript, then I'm sure you could get something working.

As for a generic media player like Quicktime, or Windows Media Player, I don't believe there is an 'easy' way to get Unreal and them working.

[legacy-Psyk]

I don't think it's really feasible to do this. I suppose it might be possible with a program with a tcp interface but it seems like a very akward workaround. I don't think we, as modders, are really meant to be able to interact with outside programs but it is possible using the tcp link as a workaround. I think it's a better alternative to just make a matinee sequence.

I've been looking to do the same thing and this is the conclusion I came up with. If you have already made videos you could always use them as promotional videos or something.

Hm, this is looking bad =(

I thought it would be easy to do something like that. In director, for example, it's pretty easy. The disadvantage of matinee like movies I think the level of detail you can but in it, if I want for example do lip-syncing or face-animations I don't think it would work. And it seems that animating with matinee is depending a lot on programming...

I would really like to incorporate pre-rendred movies for setting a atmosphere I want

Thanks for your replies btw

[legacy-Psyk]

It's something that probably would be easy if it was enabled in native code. But I guess that's one disadvantage of only modding the game and not having access to the engine itself.

Lip-synching is possible with matinee, there is a program called impersonator that allows you to do lip-synching in unreal matinee movies. You can get it from here http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/PublicModResource

edit- or just look at the sticky at the top, I just noticed that lol

ok, thanks. I see much is possible, but i still don't like the quality of the matinee movies compared to prerendered ones....

I did stumble on the bink codec, which states on their site:

"...Bink is really nice, props to you guys. It looks sweet and I haven't had any problems with the API. [We] got Bink into our Warhammer 40K project in < one day, and I got it running in Unreal in about the same time. ...good job."

* Thomas J. Holmes, DreamForge® Intertainment, Inc.

http://www.radgametools.com/binkgames.htm

Does anybody have any experience with the bink "codec" in the unreal engine?

[legacy-Psyk]

They probably had access to the native code though. I hope someone can get this working with UScript but tbh I don't think it's gonna happen.