Viewing topic Converting cutscene video files for Proton

Converting cutscene video files for Proton

Liemaeu 14 Jun 2023

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I never could get the cutscenes of Star Wars: Starfighter and Omikron - The Nomad Soul to work properly with Proton. I tried Proton-GE and installing different Windows Media Player version manually, didn't do the job either.

The Cutscenes of Star Wars: Starfighter (.bik files) don't play at all, Omikron - The Nomad Soul's "opening" cutscene plays very glitchy (colours and aspect ratio aren't correct, gets displayed two times at onces).

Back in the time when Proton was new and there was no Proton-GE I read about converting cutscene files with ffmpeg, so they work with Proton.

How is this done? Watching the cutscenes files (.bik for Starfighter, .mpg for Omikron) with VLC works perfectly.

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whizse 15 Jun 2023

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Yeah, it's an old trick. It works for some games and some video formats.

Essentially, if Wine/Proton have difficulties decoding a specific format, re-encode the video into another format that is supported both in Wine and by the specific Windows API the game uses (e.g. quartz, mfplat etc. depending on what era the game is from).

Unfortunately for Omikron it happily accepted a few different video formats as replacement (mpeg2 in .mpg container, cinepak in .avi container) but they all exhibit the same problem. I'm guessing the game uses some filter for effect for the videos that Wine doesn't support?

.bik isn't decoded by a Windows API. The game will ship with a decoder so I don't think replacing the videos will work at all.

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Liemaeu 23 Jul 2023

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Yeah, it's an old trick. It works for some games and some video formats.

Essentially, if Wine/Proton have difficulties decoding a specific format, re-encode the video into another format that is supported both in Wine and by the specific Windows API the game uses (e.g. quartz, mfplat etc. depending on what era the game is from).

Unfortunately for Omikron it happily accepted a few different video formats as replacement (mpeg2 in .mpg container, cinepak in .avi container) but they all exhibit the same problem. I'm guessing the game uses some filter for effect for the videos that Wine doesn't support?

.bik isn't decoded by a Windows API. The game will ship with a decoder so I don't think replacing the videos will work at all.

Maybe. How can I convert the video files to test it?

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whizse 23 Jul 2023

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Maybe. How can I convert the video files to test it?

ffmpeg has always been my preferred tool.

But before you start encoding the game videos you might want to try just dropping in any random videos you have laying around (renamed of course) and see what happens.

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