Bink Video
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Bink Video
| ||
| Anyone have any experience of Bink Video in Blitz? |
| ||
| I do think this more of a licence than a technical issue. Bink is a splendid professional tool used by major companies for very good reasons. It's usage costs about 20 times more than Blitz. Technically, it should be no more that calling a DLL. Regards, Dirk |
| ||
| Bink is entirely royalty-free. In fact, I believe that if you don't mind the bink logo being displayed as part of your video, you don't even have to pay a license fee (completely free). If you want to display the video without the bink logo, I think it's a one-time charge of $2000 or something. I know that as part of the SDK comes bink.dll, which contains all the exported functions you'd want to use, and which gets distributed with your game. See radgametools.com for more info. |
| ||
| I didn't want to talk anyone out of using Bink, believe me. Let me put it this way: everybody doing a commercial game will not have any problems paying licenses to them. I did it twice working for two companies, so I do not need more info (I just ask Mitch :-). It comes with a price, and it's worth every cent - it is a great piece of software. Regards, Dirk |
| ||
| soja: See radgametools.com for more info. Dirk: I did it twice working for two companies, so I do not need more info All my comments were directed towards BlackD, sorry for the misunderstanding. |
| ||
| I would not use Bink. Perhaps Bink has the best video quality. I don't know. What I do know is that to encode one small video it can take HOURS. Bink is VERY slow at encoding. That alone makes it not worth bothering with. I can't spend hours testing it to see how the quality of the video compares to other formats. Even if I was a big budget game company I would steer away from it. I cannot be bothered with a video tool which takes hours to compress video and does not even provide pre-compressed sample videos for download so that I can compare how it looks with real and computer generated video when compared to quicktime or divx. A lack of videos comparing the formats says to me that the quality of the video isn't significantly better. The only thing I can see Bink being worthwhile for would be for consoles, and that is assuming that they can't play back DVD video, which most probably can. Of course, without Bink, you have to use a codec, and the user might not have that specific codec. But if you use WMV then you can be realtively sure they will be able to decode it, and that's MPEG4. |
| ||
| @soja: no prob, got that wrong :-). @sswift: most companies (esp. the major ones) have a different opinion for good reasons. |
| ||
| Another thing, on my quest for the best Nvidia driver for my GF4-4200, in terms of stability in 3D apps (GL & DX), hassle free gaming, not having the dreaded BB directdraw slowdown bug, and general stability, the 44.03s are the ones for me. BUT! Binks will NOT playback properly on them, they're out of sync and choppy, whether in game video, or playing them stand alone, no chance. The 44.03s are staying :) Blitz can load & play anything so long as a codec is installed for it, try looking for an alternative, something free which you can distribute along with your game. Or try a native win98/NT/XP codec (they do suck a bit though!) :) Tom |
| ||
| "@sswift: most companies (esp. the major ones) have a different opinion for good reasons" And those good reasons are? |
| ||
| Tom, thats nvidia's problem. Bink is older and wiser :) |
| ||
| I would not use Bink. Perhaps Bink has the best video quality. I don't know. What I do know is that to encode one small video it can take HOURS. Bink is VERY slow at encoding. That alone makes it not worth bothering with. I can't spend hours testing it to see how the quality of the video compares to other formats. Even if I was a big budget game company I would steer away from it. I cannot be bothered with a video tool which takes hours to compress video and does not even provide pre-compressed sample videos for download so that I can compare how it looks with real and computer generated video when compared to quicktime or divx. A lack of videos comparing the formats says to me that the quality of the video isn't significantly better. Bink has some great trademarked compression algorithms which may take time but deliver smaller file sizes and better image and sound quality. They have practicaly been around for a decade and have an amazing endorsement record, since the late days of DOS/Win 3.11 their format has been one of the frequently used (3rd party) video formats in gamedevelopment. Take the trouble of looking at a few games with FMVs in it recently, lets say for example, splinter cell: pandora tomorrow? A quick look in their video folder shows .BIK files, how about all of the Command and Conquer games, the proof of this programs usefullness is demonstrated by these games. (ofcourse a few demo movies would be nice) |
| ||
| The production we did was a video rollout on over 60.000 PCs in a major consulting company with very restrictive system administration starting at 233 MHz without any acceleration. No way to install any codecs or any programs whatsoever. We produced a CD with two files: the bink dll and an executable with movie in ressource. There was not one person complaining about bugs or video quality. When you rollout a major game title with over 50.000 copies then a non-working codecs etc does cost way more money than buying Bink in terms of hotline maintenance and prestige damage. Regards, Dirk |
   |