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Why is the cutscene/FMV problem in Linux gaming so difficult to fix? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I see it a lot in visual novels, older PC games and PC ports of older non-PC games. It sounds so trivial on paper, like... just play the video? But I know it's not. Why though? Can we ever expect the problem to be fully solved? Right now it kinda seems like an uphill struggle, like by fixing cutscene playback in one game doesn't really seem to automatically fix it for other games, so it's not a situation where a convenient one size fits all solution works.

And I don't really get it, because if it's related to video codecs, there are only so many codecs out there, right? And then you also expect that there's probably just a few popular ones out there that'll be used for 99% of all cases, with a few odd outliers here and there perhaps.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Wouldn't that someone be the game company, when they first made the game? I can't imagine games rely on some system library to decode bink, it must be embedded in engine. Besides, pretty sure bink can be played on vlc, so lack of free/open source decoders isn't the issue.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just a FOSS issue; it's a software patent issue.

VLC doesn't attract a huge amount of attention because they don't really make any money and would just get forked if someone did try to destroy them.

However, larger distros with commercial backing (OpenSUSE springs to mind) often won't directly include potentially patent-infringing packages, so you have to get them from a quasi-third-party repo like Packman.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Vlc is also hosted in France, where software patents aren't legal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

France based

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The codec is embedded in the game. You are not allowed to crack a game to make it play a video or reroute it to some other software. That's illegal.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Op is saying the cutscenes don't work in-game. Nobody said anything about cracking. And I'm saying if the problem was the lack of a system decoder that could easily be solved since there are free decoders available.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As I wrote the codecs were usually included in the game. No sane developer assumed that they are already installed in the system.

Now how do you get a game to not use the codec it's shipped with? By cracking.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If the codec was included in the game you wouldn't need to pay to use it. It was already paid by the developers.

Edit: not to mention modding games is legal in most cases

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Having the runtime of the codec installed in a wine prefix is not the same as having it work. Just like wine has to work on the codec to get the data to it and output back to the game, in a way that the game, the codec and wines d3d implementation can deal with it. This is made mode difficult by some codecs doing output themselves and some handing buffers back to the game for display.

This is hard and gruesome work. With painstaking observing and duplicating behavior, since a lot is not documented and for a clean room implementation the person implementing it can not look at disassembled binaries or (hypothetical) code-leaks.

Now how do you get a game to not use the codec it’s shipped with? By cracking.

That is just wrong. "Cracking" is the circumvention of Copy-Protection. Before Denuvo afaik no Copy-Protection had data-integrty checks, so modification of game Behavior (aka Modding) did not require tampering with the Copy Protection. Best Example SKSE for Skyrim, a tool adding a lot of additional functions to the internal scripting language while still keeping copy protection in tact.