Wing Commander 4 DVD Video Volume

Triple-B

Rear Admiral
Hi, I am just playing wc 4 double sided dvd version. with all patches installed and the sound acceleration in dxdiag deactivated the game runs fine.

only one problem:


the sounds of the vids are very low, so i have to run the volume very high. after a video is finished I have to decrease the volume again, because the game is otherwise to loud.

what can i do to solve this problem.

my dvd player is power dvd
 
How loud is the playback when you playback a regular DVD in your system? When it's thesame volume, attempt to make it louder within the player to "normal" levels.

It is possible that your DVD players volume is seperate from your normal windows volume control.
 
If you are using AC3 Filters:

Click AC3 Filter Config (it should be in Start - All Programs - Ac3 Filter), set "Gain" to higher level. That should help..

Also if you hear background sounds louder than voices in the movies, you can change it in ac3 filter configuration too.

Hope this helps ;)
 
The wing commander 4 DVD (double side) runs under windows which in my opinion is the cause of many problems with running it correctly. I wander why they didn't make it running under dos as previous versions?
 
Because DOS has no access to directdraw, and other accelerators. That, and the card it got bundled with, requires windows to run. I bought the original Creative kit with a 2x DVD drive and the accelerator card. Also it was a bad purchase, not because of WC4 included, that i cherish, but there were so many problems with this card, and it lacked decent features since while it was pass-through just like a Voodoo1/2 card, it could only send movies running on it through to a TV set. You could watch the DVD video of WC4 and then play the missions on your monitor.

The single-sided version can run in DOS, AFAIK, since it is simply the 6-CD version on one DVD, without the superior Video quality.
 
I dont belive they couldn't put it under dos somehow.. They were able to play (not so bad quality) movies under DOS on 6cd version.. It's just a matter of adequate dos player I think
 
Also it was a bad purchase, not because of WC4 included, that i cherish, but there were so many problems with this card, and it lacked decent features since while it was pass-through just like a Voodoo1/2 card, it could only send movies running on it through to a TV set. You could watch the DVD video of WC4 and then play the missions on your monitor.
The single-sided version can run in DOS, AFAIK, since it is simply the 6-CD version on one DVD, without the superior Video quality.

This isn't entirely accurate. You could definitely play the game entirely on a monitor with the DVD video. The proplem was that the install was so incredibly finicky that it would not work right depending on the order you installed drivers and other variables. I don't remember any of the other DVD games having huge issues with it, just WC4.
 
This isn't entirely accurate. You could definitely play the game entirely on a monitor with the DVD video. The proplem was that the install was so incredibly finicky that it would not work right depending on the order you installed drivers and other variables. I don't remember any of the other DVD games having huge issues with it, just WC4.

You are right, and i think you misunderstood me. I wanted to both play the game and watch the video's on my television set back then, in 1997.

I dont belive they couldn't put it under dos somehow.. They were able to play (not so bad quality) movies under DOS on 6cd version.. It's just a matter of adequate dos player I think

The dos version of WC4 has about a fourth of the quality of the win95 version. There have been other games that did run onder DOS but would require an add-on card like the "Realmagic". "upgraded to VESA/SVGA"-games generally did not work well, like "Renegade-battle for jacob's star", WC3/4 and Tie fighter Deluxe CD are rare exceptions, games like "under a killing moon" and "7th guest" were horribly slow on the graphics.
 
You are right, and i think you misunderstood me. I wanted to both play the game and watch the video's on my television set back then, in 1997.

Ahh, yes. Because it's a passthrough card, that is only for MPEG2 video, it isn't actually doing the inflight gameplay at all. So yeah, if you wanted to play the game on your TV that option wasn't available. This is a tech limitiation in general from that era though. Video cards that had hardware acceleration for MPEG2 were pretty much non-existant back then. There *Were* regular video cards with TV-out so you could have probably bypassed the output on the DVD decoder card that way and used the overlay system.

Thankfully the patches we have now make this a non issue today. While it can still be a challenge to set up properly on some systems, running WC4 on your big screen HDTV is more than doable.
 
I ended up buying one of those passthrough cards just for that at an IT fair way before that(1994). It lasted for about four months and I could not get hold of the retailer anymore after it broke down. Afterwards for a following upgrade upgrade was a Nvidia Riva128 manufactured by STB, that costed $350(USD). These days TV-outs are common on a low-budget card.

And WCIV's DVD edition does not respond as smooth as the DOS version does. Then again I did not replay that game for a few years, I'll give it a go when I get a PS3.
 
If you are using AC3 Filters:

Click AC3 Filter Config (it should be in Start - All Programs - Ac3 Filter), set "Gain" to higher level. That should help..

Also if you hear background sounds louder than voices in the movies, you can change it in ac3 filter configuration too.

Hope this helps ;)
i downloaded ac3filter 2.5 lte and figured out how to get the wing commander iv dvd cinematics working. no need to change any GAIN settings where all should be 0. on AC3FILTER CONFIG, there is a tab called "SPDIF" and for passthrough i check box DTS and MPEG AUDIO. Then i went to tab says "system" under "default audio renderer" i selected "use wave out by default".

i loaded the game and all cinematics are perfect audio without any delays
 
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