small feature request

[yoshi314]

perhaps you've noticed that psx-ff7 version has videos of a little-bit better quality than pc version. yeah, i know the TV blurs the screen on a psx so it propably looks better because of that, right? no. i checked this via a psx movie ripper on my PC. i gave it a shot to replace those files by recompressing them from STR on psx to various codecs on a PC. but it does not work. ff7 seems to have some movie-check inside and my movies don't play at all. [i tried to scale them to the same resolution and framerate as the original ones]

as far as i know ff7 demo used indeo codec. retail ff7 uses duck truemotion in its avi files, which
1) has crappy quality, -_-
2) doesn't have an encoder freely available -_-

so i'd like to know if someone managed to run ff7 with custom movies. you know it would already be cool just to replace the sephiroth-in-fire scene with that one from FF7:AC [and if it would play some better codecs, like mpeg2, xvid etc in high-res]

ff7 seems to relay on something like direct-show [i forgot the proper name for it] for movie playback, so i figure it shouldn't be THAT hard to change to another DS codec for video playback, right?

perhaps someone might spare some time and make a patch for ff7 to do the job? or perhaps it's easier to pull off than i thought?

thanks for any response in advance.

[Aaron]

First of all, the movies are actually a bit better than they look in game, as you can see if you play them in Windows Media Player or something.  A lot of "fuzz" is added by FF7 because of the way it plays them in 16-bit.

If you do some searching on this, you'll find past discussions about it...  People have attempted this with limited success.

[yoshi314]

First of all, the movies are actually a bit better than they look in game, as you can see if you play them in Windows Media Player or something.  A lot of "fuzz" is added by FF7 because of the way it plays them in 16-bit.

well i did, but some of them are still ugly and blocky, some movies on a psx are actually better.

If you do some searching on this, you'll find past discussions about it...  People have attempted this with limited success.

hmm...thanks, i'll take my time and look for it...wish me luck [ :/ ]
i was just wondering if it somebody attempted to make a patch via ficedula's f77 patcher for this...

[Locutus]

i am toying with ff7 psx and ff7 pc. You can extract movies from psx. (the best way is to extract them as uncompresed avi.
Then ripp sound and music from ff7 pc movies (psx movies has only sound and no music). Now join uncompresed avi psx movies with sound, music from ff7pc and compress them using some divx codecs (of course you need encoding software and proper codecs). FF7 movies must be of resolutin 320x224.
Then put movies  in folder on your hard drive. modify ff7 (movie path) registry so it points to your movies folder. you need to have oryginal cd  in your cd drive but movies will be played from hdd.
Most important thing is to download  tool fddshow from internet and install it (20041013 version) or movie in game will be green or with artifacts.
Now you have psx movies in ff7pc or any other movies you want to put.

I was trying ficedulas 32bit graphic patch , but it couses battle swirl to vanish and movies are cut in half( i can see movies on left part of the screen but right side is black)

Movies can be compresed to 300 mb without quality loss so you can put them with game data on one disc.( but you still need oryginal discs for cd-check)

Nice to see someone from Poland.  Cześć. Bye

[yoshi314]

this is kinda strange...i did the same thing, except for the sound tracks, and it did not work :/

so it really does not work with higher res? [shhesh, i was hoping to put in there some high-res clips from ff7ac trailers :/

[Locutus]

i was'nt able to use high res movies becouse then game was crashing.
About movies - check if you have changed ff7 registry movie path.
All tested on windows xp