Linux Gaming

15474 readers

162 users here now

Gaming on the GNU/Linux operating system.

Recommended news sources:

Related chat:

Related Communities:

Please be nice to other members. Anyone not being nice will be banned. Keep it fun, respectful and just be awesome to each other.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

In older times when in-game scenes weren't invented yet game studios often played Bink videos.

You need a licence for the codec meaning someone has to pay to play.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 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 (2 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

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (9 replies)