Support for DVD cutscenes

[jan-kleks]

A DVD version of Claw had high-quality cutscenes which are a pain to run in-game on modern operating systems.

[ghost]

jan-kleks, the DVD cutscenes is in .vbo format, I talked with pjasicek and cutscenes will be added in future, priority now is the levels and boss logics

[pjasicek]

For implementing and including video cutscenes there could be 2 possibilities for me:

1. Use external library (ffmpeg comes to mind, classic C library) and integrate it the hard way
2. Use SDL2 rendering capabilities to render video (I would still need to decode the video format, whatever it would be)

Another thing is that the DVD version CLAW.REZ archive has around 700 megabytes which is a bit heavyweight for distribution. But I guess I could support it to the degree that if a player would have the video files there, the cutscenes would trigger else they would just get skipped.

[pjasicek]

From a brief look at the possibilities, it is not that hard when using SDL2 rendering. I am just worried about the resulting FPS if I would use some compressed form of the videos, like mp4 on rigs which are not that fast. To make the video seamless I would need to preprocess 2-3 frames ahead and then just swap frames at appropriate times. I am not quite sure what FPS the Claw cutscenes have, but certainly not more than 30.

I will make some simple program (in 1-2 weeks) to test my assumptions and post the results here.

[jan-kleks]

Disney-style animation was often created taking into account particular frame rate and frame count. So it would be nice to get it right. Of course, we don't need a 256 color limitation, I've heard this was the case when playing the DVD cutscenes in-game.

[pjasicek]

This miniproject plays coded videos (I tried playing *.mkv) using SDL2 as renderer:

https://github.com/pockethook/player

Since it is under GPL2 I could make a wrapper around it and incorporate it into this project. Though this would bring more library dependencies (3 libraries I think) which is hell for porting it on mobile platforms generally.

[pjasicek]

I spent a couple of hours delving into incorporating ffmpeg into SDL2. Video playback is fine, audio playback is not - I could not get it running.

Anyway, this would introduce new heavy-weight dependency (6 shared libraries) so I am not going to implement this anytime soon.

[ghost]

hope than you think to include this on the future. cutscenes are the 50% of the nostalgic feeling of this game.

[jstasiak]

I spent a couple of hours delving into incorporating ffmpeg into SDL2. Video playback is fine, audio playback is not - I could not get it running.

Do you have a branch with that version of the game? I'm sure there's someone who could help with the audio playback.

[pjasicek]

I think no, I tried it locally on regular branch back then and when I could not get even get it to proof of concept stage I threw it away.