FF7Music as a Template for Other Ideas?

[Tsetra]

Couldn't think of a clear topic title to convey my thoughts here so I apologize. Basically I'm intrigued with how FF7Music apparently works outside the engine to deliver PSF and MP3 music. I'm no coder, so I'm talking as a casual observer here, but can the engine tolerate other things being manipulated by "3rd party" programs as well?
For example, here's something I'm envisioning, possible or not:

All movies are set to where they're so short you never see them really. If you've ever played FF7 with the movies ripped out, you know what I'm talking about here. When FF7 calls for a movie to play, such a hypothetical program - we'll call it FF7Movie - brings up it's own version that's not limited to low resolutions and 16bit color. Obviously "FF7Movie" would come with instructions for encoding your own movies, as distributing them would be unfeasible. Also, I'm seeing problems here with movie overlays where the characters are still visible and move around even.

From a technical standpoint, is this possible? Or is FF7.exe going to just freak out and crash?

Also, I apologize if this is better suited to another section, I wasn't quite sure if this would fit here or tweaking.

[blargiefarg]

In the registry look for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII and edit moviepath to where ever you want in your hard drive. (i.e. C:\ff7movies) so if you were to find higher resolution copies of the files or edit the resolution, then yes, that would be possible. great idea, i myself was thinking the same thing when i found that registry section

[Harruzame]

If thats the case..regardless of how the movie is rendered in HQ ( PS3 movie quality, crisp, clear and smooth one) it will not cause errors and the overlays will not look like floating ( e.g. red soldiers after the 1st train scene )?....

[Covarr]

That would be the difficult part.

FF7Music works fairly easily because modern OSes have no trouble playing multiple audio streams at once, so playing MP3 music doesn't block out sound effects.
On the other hand, getting an external program to display BEHIND the 3D elements on the screen but IN FRONT of the original movies is highly unfeasible. The only thing I can think of is to replace the old video files with empty ones, and set that color to be completely transparent such that you can see whatever's behind it, even the desktop (is this even possible?) and then have the new video player running behind FF7 entirely. I don't think there's a way for a program to on-the-fly inject a video into the middle of another program's 3D, though.

[Harruzame]

Quite bluntly....

"Its Possible but quite Unpossible right now"

 

[Aali]

Err, you do realize that the original post is very old, right?

This is no longer an issue since the custom driver is not limited to low resolutions and 16bit color.

[titeguy3]

I sometimes wonder how people *find* these old threads to drudge up... sometimes I've got trouble finding certain week old threads.

BTW Aali, I'm aware that this question would probably fit better somewhere else, but this is probably just as good a place as any other:

When a PC for whatever reason can't keep up with decoding one of the FMV's in the game (usually a common occurrence with high res FMV's), the audio just sort of spazzes, then mutes or restarts from the beginning. Any idea what causes this? Or if there's any method of guaranteeing that the audio plays at the same rate as the video? Or at least that it won't stutter and repeat?

[Aali]

It's because my movie player is a piece of crap. To fix it I would have to write a better one, and that's not high priority right now.