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Bundling tutorial videos with the game


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If a person does not have access to the internet he would get 0AD with a CD. Would it not be OK having the videos on the CD (without carrying the ability to play them ingame but perhaps an open source video player for all supported OSs)?

If PPL download it they obviously have a decent internet connection. For those cases links ingame would be nice (much easier to realize).

Edited by FeXoR
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If a person does not have access to the internet he would get 0AD with a CD. Would it not be OK having the videos on the CD (without carrying the ability to play them ingame but perhaps an open source video player for all supported OSs)?

They could probably be presented in a local .html file. Then the web browser would deal with playing them.

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Windows doesn't come with flash/real/divX player plug-in AFAIK. For most formats the default video player on windows (the illness MS Media Player) needs to download the codec... and so needs an internet connection.

Most GNU/Linux systems don't come with players for proprietary codecs at all due to their lack of freedom (like free to change). Oh, wait, vlc! (is this legal???).

I have no information about macOS...

Edited by FeXoR
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All browsers have support for one or more of: .avi, .wmv, .mp4, .mov, .ogv, .webm.

Well, .avi and .mp4 is always there...

.avi is just a container, not a codec. But there should be a format supported by all OSs by default. But I doubt it's one of the listed ones ^^.

If that old video codecs are considered good enough for the pretty high resolution videos BrynnOfCastlegate made is another question then.

EDIT: But I'm wrong! For example XVid is an MPEG-4 codec that should be supported by any OS. Some others are supported as well. "Natively" seams to mean that a codec is available for that OS though. This might still include the need of a download. Not sure.

http://en.wikipedia...._system_support

Edited by FeXoR
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Most Linux distribution only supports Ogg/Theora/Vorbis and Webm/VP8/Vorbis by default but they are not natively supported on Mac/Windows. Maybe Webm could be used also bundling the decoder for Mac and Windows?

Yes, something like that. Or bring the VLC Media Player with the CD that is also available for any OS officially supported by 0 A.D. and GPL/LGPL.licensed.

Edited by FeXoR
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Yes, something like that. Or bring the VLC Media Player with the CD that is also available for any OS officially supported by 0 A.D. and GPL/LGPL.licensed.

Distributing VLC may not be legally in some countries, while it's free software it include many patented codecs (this is also why Debian/Ubuntu/... don't ship it by default). But probably no one will complain with 0 A.D. since there are many others bigger sites still distributing it :)

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Yes, that's what I thought ^^. VLC is not entirely legal.

Hm, perhaps XBMC Media Center? It can be compiled with encrypted DVD support (AFAIK the legal issue of VLC) but it's optional so a version without libdvdcss could be legal and GPL licensed.

That seams to be the only option I can see in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_player_software

Edited by FeXoR
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The videos shouldn't have embedded text, but could use youtube subtitles that can be translated to different languages.

Hi! Can YouTube subtitles be positioned anywhere besides the bottom of the screen? Can they use different fonts? I am concerned that using subtitles would not look nice with the video. Also, a separate file for viewing anywhere besides YouTube would need the text. Perhaps we could leave the text on and add subtitles in multiple languages in addition to it.

Regarding in-browser video playback, Windows 8 now includes flash automatically.

--Brynn

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Regarding in-browser video playback, Windows 8 now includes flash automatically.

The main problem is for old systems. A major percentage of the windows home users are yet to to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. By the time of Windows XP, Internet Explorer was on its 7th edition, more or less, and by that time it didn't have many features that nowadays are essential, such as Flash compatibility, much less the capability to ready many media files besides the most common image formats and .mp3/.wav audio files.

Internet Explorer 9, i think, already includes HTML5 compatibility, so flash videos shouldn't be a problem for whomever has a "up to date" software, the problem is really for those who don't.

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The problem is: the people is asking for an offline solution besides written manual. Not saying this must be implemented, but a solution should be at least thought of and maybe a ticket added as "would be nice to have".

This is why I said offer the videos for download, for people who don't want to use online viewers. This is no problem as long as we have the original AVI videos. It's no more difficult than putting them on our web server somewhere and linking them from the release download page(s), or something. We can bundle them if we do physical CD/DVD or thumb-drive releases at some point.

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original AVI videos

that sounds like a really bad idea…

just a bro-suggestion from my side: let AVI die, as it can be seen as deprecated nowadays…

you cannot put h264 or any other modern video codec or subtitles inside an avi container(that would be useless anyways as avi should be compatible and those are not) without violating the codec/avi specification (unless you go for something like h264 base profile, but then using it altogether is rather pointless)

for a master you should really use some other container, like matroska (.mkv, .mka), that has far more flexibility.

in a mkv you can use arbitrary number of video, audio and subtitle streams, and even attach arbitrary binary data(like fonts for the subtitles or a license.txt file, box-art or whatever), translated chapter names

then you can include SSA/@#$%-subtitles, which you can style however you like (want some nice karaoke effect for the ingame voices you hear in the video??)

for the download you can offer both files, a nice compatible avi thing with burned-in subtitles in a divx/xvid video+mp3 audio for compatibility and the already mentioned mkv thing with multiple text streams for i18n + a hq h264/theora video+ flac/ogg sound

EDIT: your word-filter doesn’t like the file format, lol

Edited by luziferius
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