How to optimize background video?

[raynebc]

I'm done a couple charts that had a background video, and I wanted to see if there are any specific guidelines for maximizing performance, such as:

*Using a specific codec. The AVI container allows for various codecs, and I'm not sure if the video functionality in DWSK is able to handle some more efficiently than others.

*Using a specific resolution. Should the video's resolution match the resolution of Phase Shift's display size to avoid wasted processing time to scale the video? Can Phase Shift be told to letterbox the video instead of scale it?

*Using a specific bitrate. For the sake of performance, I'm assuming that a lower bitrate is ideal. However, do constant bitrate videos have better success with Phase Shift? One of the screen captures I made shows the background video fall in and out of sync, so I don't know if Phase Shift had to drop some BG video frames. The chart seems to stay in perfect sync at all times, which is great.

Besides those, are there any other major factors to consider? Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.

[asskickulater]

well, ive done quite a bit of testing with this, ive found that AVI using the xvid codec is the smoothest format. bitrate is as simple as the higher it is, the more possible lag it has. resolution, the smaller it is, the less lag it would have, I've found 720x480 is generally a pretty smooth res, an extra hint is to set ps's priority to high, it don't do much for the game, but it contributes to a smooth video background. I normally remove the audio from a video, I always figured it'd be more work for ps to mute the audio, I don't know if it actually makes a difference or not. also, I think the lag might be directly related to the file size, im not sure though, im still trying to find a way to confirm that or not.

anyone is welcome to add on to this with what they've found, and if you think I'm wrong with something tell me and I'll test it! maybe we can get a standard together

[knapman [FD]]

noones really put together any exact numbers from testing so its hard to say what works best, the settings for the default background were mostly picked based on file size as we didn't want to increase the download size of the game package to much, didn't really look into the performance side as we were keeping it pretty simple anyway

there is no specific focus on formats, its just high quality video or complex codecs will have higher requirements to run smoothly, modern cards do have optimisations for h264 based codecs, but im not sure if the game would benefit from this but you could give it a try

the background is set to a lower priority so if the machine is struggling then it keeps the important parts running well, so this just means your on the borderline of what your machine can handle

i don't think scaling is likely to be something to worry about

if anyone cares to post some results then i guess we can put some recommended performance codecs into the readme

[David]

I wish I could give you some techincal info regarding this but all the decoding is handled by directshow and I'm not an expert with this. As such I'd assume that you'd have to look into which codecs are more processor intensive.

Thanks
David