I'm trying to enhance the look of movies and so far I have no luck. Let me explain.
I was able to get these two ingame playbacks:
1. decoding by original TrueMotion decoder
2. decoding by ffdshow filter
1 2
Both are bad.
1. TrueMotion decoding has this strange grainy overlay...it's not that bad on this scaled picture but click it for fullscreen and you'll see what I mean (especially the black area). That's the way it looks in game. I don't like the grains and I don't know how to disable this overlay in TM. Any suggestions?
2. You can see that with this ffdshow decoding the colours are too glowy. It looks ugly and besides that considerably mismatches ingame colours. There are those scenes where game switches between FMV and game engine and with those glowy colour it feels like a fist in the eye. Unfortunately with the newer versions of ffdshow you can't even use this decoding anymore (this "black screen and Eidos theme heard" issue that's been showing up lately in the forums).
Now if I play the movies in Media player or BSplayer with TrueMotion decoding it does not have this grainy overlay...observe:
No dots. That's the way I want it to look in game. But how?
I've come to idea that maybe encoding all the videos with another codec (e.g. xvid) could do the job. So I've loaded it in VirtualDub to recompress it with xvid. It uses this
TrueMotion 2X version 2.5.2.2 for VFW to load videos. Even then it's noticable that the video has stains in the place of grains (mainly visible in the black areas). It's better than this grainy overlay but still not that good and clean as in common player. I can try any codec with any settings the stains will be there on the recompressed video. Like on this xvid
TMsample.avi (2.6 Mb).
I admit I am not very experienced with those encoding/decoding things so please, give me some pointers. How can I load the videos in VirtualDub without the stains...like the players do? Or even better how can I make the game playback the original TM videos without the grainy overlay and still without ridiculous colours?
I'm still wondering how comes that with newer ffdshow the game cannot run the movies as before even when Media Player has no problems (although it's the same old glowy-colours story). I've tampered with the latest ffdshow decoder settings and the only thing I was able to achieve was this:
..which makes the game use the grainy TrueMotion decoder even when ffdshow is set to use "libavcodec" for decoding. The same goes for DV settings. When I removed TrueMotion codec the game was not able to handle the movies. As if it was referring only to TrueMotion decoder itself. Strangely enough Media player was using only ffdshow as a decoder with this settings.
Could someone experienced with ffdshow explain me that, please?