Full motion video

[Kawa]

In my collection, I have exactly one game that has AVI cutscenes: King's Quest 6 CD. For a laugh, I copied HDLOGO.AVI to my SCI Companion scratchpad and removed most of the logo stuff from the title screen, repalcing that with a simple ShowMovie(0 "hdlogo.avi"), then restoring the usual palette in the next state and all that. That works, no problem. So I made it play TOON.AVI, confirming that Media Player Classic doesn't like MS Video 1 files with (certain kinds of) palette changes.

Turns out ffmpeg can't encode to MS Video 1, but luckily I have content creation programs that can export to AVI, including the option to use MS Video 1...

Unknown tag '....' found!

Oh. What '....' though? There's no such thing in this file, as far as I can see.

Fun exercise: look closely at the JUNK chunks in KQ6CD's HDLOGO.AVI file.

[Collector]

Note that the AVI intro was only used in the Win version. There are a few SCI games that used AVIs, but they are either Win interpreters or SCI2+. GK1 (Win), GK2 demo (Win only), KQ7 (Win), QfG4 (Win). The DOS versions of these used SEQ, or in the case of KQ7, RBT. An AVI to SEQ converter might be nice to have.

[Kawa]

Note that the AVI intro was only used in the Win version.

I know. That's why I went in expecting it to only work at all in ScummVM. And with the KQ6 videos, it did.

And yeah, I suppose it would be nice to have a way to make SEQ files.

[lskovlun]

Unknown tag '....' found!

Oh. What '....' though? There's no such thing in this file, as far as I can see.

The tag2str routine substitutes dots if the actual character is not printable ASCII. Sort of like hex editors do.
It could be due to a bug in the AVI file parser (which is shared by all of ScummVM) or a corrupted file of some sort.

[Kawa]

I most sincerely doubt it's the latter.

[Kawa]

I believe I have found and fixed the issue that made my sample movie play discolored outside of SeqLab and ScummVM. From studying OmerMor's interpreter source, specifically movie.h, I have identified some critical fields that needed to be set. The only remaining issue was that you're not supposed to use the last three colors in SCI16+.

The download in the stash (check my signature) has been updated, both in the "sets the critical fields" sense and the "book example frames don't use reserved colors" sense.

Full disclosure: I've only tested this on SCI16, not SCI11 or ScummVM.

[OmerMor]

Great news!

OmerMor's interpreter source

Last I checked it was Sierra's source... 

[troflip]

btw, I'm pretty sure SCI16 refers to "16 bit SCI", not version 1.6.

[Collector]

That was the way I took it, too.

[Kawa]

I call it that to distinguish it from regular in-the-wild no-debugger SCI11.

[Kawa]

for (var frame = 0; frame < 16; frame++)
That is a very bad bug and I should be ashamed of myself.

Fixed version below, obviously.

[MusicallyInspired]

Fixed version below, obviously.

Is it though?

[Kawa]

Should be in the stash that's linked in my sig.

Oh, here's a before and after:
Before, with the <16 bug.
During, with a resource size limit straddling view, coincidentally sixteen frames.
After, with the boot hand included so you know it's not a bullshot.

Big update!
SeqMaker now has left-right difference windowing as well as top-bottom. That is, stored lines are no longer always 320 pixels long. This reduces day1.seq from 1.09 MB to only 608 KB, with no loss of actual content! The only way this could be made smaller is if it supported compression, but only my player does that.

[Collector]

How about making it a plugin for Companion?

[Kawa]

I'd think some kind of UI would be required for that haha