About construct2 and videos

Question for Ashley.

Do you think one day youre going to develop an official video player for construct2??

We know its a game engine, games are used in games too, and the engine can be used as a multimedia tool, too because its becomming bigger and more powerfull every time you add an update.

so my question is that about video players, because i use constrcut2 for websites, or multimedia apps.

thanks <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Unfortunately, in my mind it doesn't make much business sense for Scirra to add features that are not primarily intended for games.

+1 for a video player from me. I'd like to use C2 as a front end for a demo reel of stuff (I did one in 2008). Basically a font end to select different videos.

sqiddster, I'd argue that video playback is a very important feature for modern games.

Just yesterday I was watching Myst's co-creator Robyn Miller do a post-mortem on Myst from GDC, and he said that when Quicktime was released about halfway through the development of the game, it changed their project significantly for the better.

Bit of an arbitrary example, but my point is that some developers might find video playback to be critical to their game, or it might open up new possibilities, and it's certainly the kind of feature that wouldn't hurt to have, especially for those of us looking more towards desktop than browser-based as launch platforms.

And, yes, I'm aware of the plugin - this post is purely in support of an integrated solution and in favour of this thread.

agree with GeometriX

Not everyone is making simple platform games where you could do intro or cutscene using simple layout, sprites and timers.

In some cases pre rendered animations or simple video could add a lot to overall game quality.

The main reason is the encoding issue, like with audio. We have to dual encode all audio formats because petty arguments by browser makers mean they can't agree on one format that works everywhere. However at least audio is relatively simple to convert. There are good free tools that we've taken advantage of, and encoding is relatively simple (generally you just set a bitrate and go).

With video it seems to get a lot more complicated. Again there needs to be two formats encoded to support all browsers: Theora or WebM and H.264. However I've found it hard to find good tools that are definitely legal to use in commercial software, and can decode a decent variety of video formats. For example ffmpeg looks like the best candidate for an encoder, but they admit on their own website if you use it in a commercial product some companies may come after you for licensing fees. And in audio, 16-bit PCM .wavs are basically guaranteed to be decodable by anything. What's the same format for video though? Will .avi actually work with all encoders? I must admit I don't know much about video processing - does anyone even still use .avi? It's a lot less convenient to use uncompressed video than it is to use uncompressed audio, since uncompressed video files are truly gigantic. So I'm not even sure if dual encoding will be useful, if it can only definitely encode a ridiculously impractical format like .avi to both necessary formats. If anyone out there is a video expert, I would appreciate some tips on how to solve this.

You can always encode the video files yourself if you know what you're doing, and then I believe there's a third party plugin that can play videos too.

Ashley if you need help about video codecs-compression ratio-bitrate and sound, i can help your for this.

I work in editing-compositing and vfx for movies, so i work with almost all the differents videos standart

imothep85 - well, do you know of any command-line tools that can encode to WebM or Theora and are free to use in commercial software? How about H.264?

there's firefogg, a firefox extention thats an excellent webm encoder. It's interface driven tho. Free too.

firefogg.org

Hmm as far as I'm interested (I'm into vfx as well) I don't think you should bother including the actual encoding in there (and I doubt you can find better than ffmpeg either)

There's already a bunch of tools for that...and C2 is becoming a huge download already

I wouldn't mind native support for playback control though

bon4ire - we can't use a Firefox extension from Construct 2!

:D I know. I saw it more as an assisting tool.

But yes, I don't believe C2 should encode for video since there are way too many tools out there that can already do it.

The main reason is the encoding issue, like with audio. We have to dual encode all audio formats because petty arguments by browser makers mean they can't agree on one format that works everywhere. However at least audio is relatively simple to convert. There are good free tools that we've taken advantage of, and encoding is relatively simple (generally you just set a bitrate and go).

With video it seems to get a lot more complicated. Again there needs to be two formats encoded to support all browsers: Theora or WebM and H.264. However I've found it hard to find good tools that are definitely legal to use in commercial software, and can decode a decent variety of video formats. For example ffmpeg looks like the best candidate for an encoder, but they admit on their own website if you use it in a commercial product some companies may come after you for licensing fees. And in audio, 16-bit PCM .wavs are basically guaranteed to be decodable by anything. What's the same format for video though? Will .avi actually work with all encoders? I must admit I don't know much about video processing - does anyone even still use .avi? It's a lot less convenient to use uncompressed video than it is to use uncompressed audio, since uncompressed video files are truly gigantic. So I'm not even sure if dual encoding will be useful, if it can only definitely encode a ridiculously impractical format like .avi to both necessary formats. If anyone out there is a video expert, I would appreciate some tips on how to solve this.

You can always encode the video files yourself if you know what you're doing, and then I believe there's a third party plugin that can play videos too.

bon4ire

With video it seems to get a lot more complicated. Again there needs to be two formats encoded to support all browsers: Theora or WebM and H.264. However I've found it hard to find good tools that are definitely legal to use in commercial software, and can decode a decent variety of video formats. For example ffmpeg looks like the best candidate for an encoder, but they admit on their own website if you use it in a commercial product some companies may come after you for licensing fees. And in audio, 16-bit PCM .wavs are basically guaranteed to be decodable by anything. What's the same format for video though? Will .avi actually work with all encoders? I must admit I don't know much about video processing - does anyone even still use .avi? It's a lot less convenient to use uncompressed video than it is to use uncompressed audio, since uncompressed video files are truly gigantic. So I'm not even sure if dual encoding will be useful, if it can only definitely encode a ridiculously impractical format like .avi to both necessary formats. If anyone out there is a video expert, I would appreciate some tips on how to solve this.

You can always encode the video files yourself if you know what you're doing, and then I believe there's a third party plugin that can play videos too.

bon4ire

I personally don't care about how big construct's download size is. As long as we have as much functionality as possible, I'm fine. besides it's only 100mb right now. I could care less if it were 500mb.

I do think videos would be great cause I would like to make full animated sequences for my games. Hopefully there's a way around this problem.