Open Source Media Player Gets WC Support (January 10, 2007)

[Cpl Hades]

The FFmpeg project is an open source system being produced to play and record various video formats. Among other game related video formats such as those used by Westwood games, the program will also play back movie files as used by WC3, and possibly also WC4. It is a function performed very well already by HCl's movie player, but it's nice to see this kind of support from outside the WC community. If you'd like to try FFmpeg, the program will run on both Windows and Linux, you can download the source code from here. Unfortunately you'll need to compile it yourself.

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Original update published on January 10, 2007

 

[Unregistered]

I hate to sound totally clueless, but I am

I downloaded ffmpeg but since I'm not a veteran programmer and multimedia specialist I have no idea how to make it, you know, work. That program seems to be written for the programmers and anyone without a Computer Sciences degree is left out in the cold. I really want to use this program to convert the in-game videos to a more usable format, does anyone know what command will actually accomplish that? Much obliged!

 

[AD]

I downloaded ffmpeg but since I'm not a veteran programmer and multimedia specialist I have no idea how to make it, you know, work. That program seems to be written for the programmers and anyone without a Computer Sciences degree is left out in the cold. I really want to use this program to convert the in-game videos to a more usable format, does anyone know what command will actually accomplish that? Much obliged!

It's probably easier just to download the WC movie player here at the CIC. It lets you save them to avi too after which you can convert them to whatever.

However, with a bit of looking around you should be able to find a version of ffmpeg that is prebuilt for you. Possibly do a search for mplayer.

 

[BrynS]

I don't use FFmpeg myself, so I'm afraid I can't help you with the appropriate command, but if you're looking for a fairly quick way to convert the in-game movies to another format then you really can't go wrong with HCL's movie player linked above.

HCL's player lets you rip individual FMVs into uncompressed avi (just remember to rename each rip.avi to something else, e.g. tbomb-test.avi , as the next time you rip a video using the player, it will write to and/or overwrite any existing rip.avi file). You can then import the uncompressed avi file into your editor of choice.

When doing this, I tend to use VirtualDub to trim/crop/filter/etc each clip and then encode each clip with a lossless video codec, such as Lagarith (and maintain/convert the audio to uncompressed PCM) for eventual editing.

 

[Worf]

Or just wait. FFmpeg is used in a lot of video players, including VLC (VideoLAN Client) and MPlayer. These projects will incorporate the latest changes in FFmpeg soon enough.

Tons of programs use FFmpeg internally. I believe there's also a directshow filter that uses FFmpeg.

 

[ChrisReid]

It's probably easier just to download the WC movie player here at the CIC. It lets you save them to avi too after which you can convert them to whatever.

http://hcl.wcrevival.de/wcmv_1_2a.zip is the file. It sounds like that's what you want instead of the player in the original post.