Regarding the old thread about the KMVC... (sorry)

[RobbyW]

I'm talking about this one here: http://forum.team17.co.uk/showthread.php?t=9965

First, the link to VidEdit is broken, here is a couple of unbroken links to it (though like the one in the original topic, these'll probably be broken in two years' time as well =P):

http://www.trix.com/buz/faq.html#software-19
http://www.dimensions.org/win95/files/

Second, I've just spent a few minutes trying to open Logo.avi (from the archive on the T17 FTP called "t17intro.zip"), and neither VidEdit, VirtualDub, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, nor even the mighty (ahem) IrfanView or VLC Media Player can open it up (well, actually, VLC can playback the audio track, so it's halfway there).

Given that recent Googling didn't uncover much in the way of help in opening this, except for the aforementioned thread about this codec two years ago (and a link on afreecodec (http://www.afreecodec.com/?page=/results.php%3Fsearch%3DKMVC%26submit.x%3D0%26submi t.y%3D0) that appeared to imply that the KMVC was on these forums as a download - of course it is!) , I'm not exactly expecting a miracle solution in the next post, but all the same, any help would be appreciated. =P

Also, I'm new here; to sum up, I'm a big fan of the 2D Worms games on the PC, and Addiction Pinball, and trying to get back into Worms World Party as I haven't played it for a couple of years now... yeah. That's about it =P

EDIT: Oh, one more thing - didn't really have a clue where to post this, but as I figured it was a technical-related issue, I posted here. Hope this is the right place for it...

[bonz]

i guess the reason why t17 haven't released the codec, is, that the copyright is still with karl morton.

maybe someone at t17 could recompress the w2 videos with divx or xvid codec and host them on the t17 ftp server (like it's already done with the w1 videos).

edit:
i just tried converting the videos with videdit, but the program shuts down when i try to open a file.

[RobbyW]

Well, I haven't found a way to convert the video, but I have found a neat way to play back the video using the supplied LOGO.BAT file (which initializes the supplied DOS4GW.EXE and PLAY.EXE utilities) - that is, to load it up in DOSBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net) (if you get hold of it, make sure to get hold of the frontend called D-Fend, it rocks).

Incredibly, it does work very well, with only a couple of tiny graphical glitches (though I don't think they are actually glitches, but I can't make my mind up about them :o). The only problem is that if you have loads of other videos in KMVC, you'll have to constantly modify the parameters, e.g. if you wanted to play some other file, you'd have to change it to that particular filename. But hey, it's a start =P

NOTE: I just had a look at the Worms 1 videos up on the server, and quite frankly they look, and sound, absolutely hideous. I understand that bandwidth usage on the FTP must be of great concern to T17, but you can definitely get better results than that with the right encoder (hello, XviD) and some, erm, sense. That said, some of the Worms 2 movies are much better, notably baseball.avi and bandit.avi (andyd.mov is OK too, good stuff!), although I still think those could be improved on.

Before you rant at me about this, I am a bit of a quality "nut" as I've been capping some of my old VHS tapes recently, and I spent a lot of time re-encoding the raw AVIs down to XviD in VDub with different settings, filters etc. to get the best result, which is quite tiresome (I use guides from this site (http://doom9.org), another reason why I'm more quality-obsessed than I was before x_x)

[bonz]

using the supplied LOGO.BAT file (which initializes the supplied DOS4GW.EXE and PLAY.EXE utilities)
you're not talking about worms 2, do you?
if you have loads of other videos in KMVC
i think those eight w2 intro movies are the only ones.
or are the w1 movies in kmvc too?

[RobbyW]

No no, I'm talking about the contents of the file t17intro.zip on the Team17 FTP server - here's the link to the folder it's in:

ftp://ftp.team17.com/pub/misc/

And, as far as I know, the Worms 1 vids are in KMVC - I can't be absolutely sure because I don't have Worms United with me (not even sure if I still have it at all back home), but given that the .avi file in t17intro.zip is in KMVC, I can't see why Team17 would've used a different codec for all the other vids in Worms [United] - after all, Karl Morton appears in the credits for it (even in the original Worms demo, also on the FTP server) as doing "FMV+ADD.CODING".

[crittur]

It´s any news? Do you think it will be someday possible download FMV´s videos converted in DivX??? I hope it´ll be possible, Team 17 celebrate 15th Anniversary and i think it´s good occasion provide it for fans...

[gaara]

Have a look here:
http://kmlinux.fjfi.cvut.cz/~pausp1/html/video/worms1/
It's my attempt to convert worms1 videos from KVMC to MPEG4. (Nothing extra, using tv-out).. Hope you like it...

[bonz]

Have a look here:
http://kmlinux.fjfi.cvut.cz/~pausp1/html/video/worms1/
It's my attempt to convert worms1 videos from KVMC to MPEG4. (Nothing extra, using tv-out).. Hope you like it...
nice.
better quality than the .movs from the t17 ftp server.

could you do the same with the worms 2 videos?

[gaara]

could you do the same with the worms 2 videos?

I'd like to convert W2 videos but unfortunatelly I don't have any program to playback those AVIs. For Worms 1 I used play.exe utility but it does not work for Worms2 AVIs. If anyone has it (even for DOS) please let me know.

I'll try to get Worms2 game and capture videos directly from the game. TV-out is sometimes useful :)

[bonz]

capture videos directly from the game. TV-out is sometimes useful
that's what i was thinking about.

[gaara]

I'll capture it as soon as I will have the game. I think a friend of mine has it.

[AndrewTaylor]

I doubt if the codec exists in a form that Media Player or similar could use. You'r probably have to write a programme to convert the videos to another format -- uncompressed AVI would probably be easiest, and then you could compress that any way you like with a conventional tool.

[bonz]

I doubt if the codec exists in a form that Media Player or similar could use.
probably.

what would be needed is a video player/converter/tool that supports palette changes per frames.

ms videdit doesn't work for me in win xp.
and virtual dub (mod) doesn't support it "yet".

the problem for me is, that if i start the worms 2 launcher with fmvs enabled it switches to 640*480 for the video, but not back to 1280*1024, which results in the w2 main menu being stretched to fullscreen.

[juuser]

sry for waking this old thread up...

but i was getting interested of looking those old worms2 videos that i liked alot when i played the game...just to remind me old times:)

and at first i thought that there's no problems, they're avi-s, probably uncompressed and every player should handle these just fine. But i got disappointed when even VLC didn't play so i googled and found this thread too. I got myself finally solution how to play worms2 videos on windows xp, so i thought maybe someone else has the same problem and wants to remind the old times like i did too :) Or just wanna watch these very funny videos for the first time ever (if you were'nt there when worms2 was a hit:P) :)

so here's the solution - *nix's MPlayer for windows (not windows media player!) can play these files! You can get it from: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

get the newest one (MPlayer 1.0pre8 Windows build atm) and extract it into some folder (preferably mplayer:P). Create folder 'res' under your mplayer folder for better overview and copy all worms2 videos from your cd (or if you don't have it, download videos from: http://www.fileplanet.com/dl.aspx?/strategyplanet/wormhut/worms2/FMVs/FMVs.zip ) there.

Now, MPlayer works this way, that you run mplayer with video filename [and path] as an parameter. Easiest way to do it, is to go to start -> run -> cmd (command in w9x) and then cd to your mplayer folder and then 'mplayer.exe blah.avi' for example (which means that blah.avi is in same folder as mplayer.exe).

Like for an example if you extracted mplayer to c:\mplayer and mplayer.exe is in c:\mplayer\mplayer.exe, then you have to do following when running cmd from Run window.

cd c:\mplayer
mplayer blah.avi

that's all :)

But even so there seems to be a slight problem with worms2 movies. Atleast in my case. If i just run these with MPlayer then sound is out of sync more or less. So i messed around with fps settings to get it almost right. So if you made that res folder into your mplayer folder and copied all those vids into there, then make new text file into your mplayer folder and rename it to playvids.cmd (that means ofcourse you have to have 'show extensions' option enabled in your windows explorer) or smth like that and insert those lines into that file and save and just execute the file with doubleclicking or running from cmd window to get playback of all worms2 movies in fullscreen. If you prefer no fullscreen, just remove the -fs switch. If you have movies in other folder, just replace res. So here's the playvids.cmd source (replace path in first line, where your mplayer resides, this is for doubleclicking on cmd file to work properly; pause inbetween every movie is because that you could easily quit viewing, instead of typing really fast escape in movie and ctrl+c in between 2 movies ):

cd "c:\blahblahb blahblaha\mplayer"
mplayer -fs -fps 29.3 res\intro.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 28.3 res\bandit.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 28.3 res\pingpong.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 28.3 res\baseball.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 28 res\tv.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 27.3 res\grenade1.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 27 res\vidcam.avi
pause
mplayer -fs -fps 28.3 res\armag.avi

Worked for me fine. Very funny clips (incase you haven't seen them yet):) Let me know if you have any problems or questions.

Worms powwaaaah!

[Lex]

Nice work! I'm sure your work will be appreciated. :)

[Cheesy1]

Thanks so much for this! I couldn't get any Media Player to work, but this does. It's a shame it's command-line based, but as long as it works, making a BAT file isn't hard.

One thing though, all the videos play stretched for some reason. I managed to fix it by adding the parameter "-monitoraspect 1280:664" to each line (these values work for my monitor at least - 1280x800 15.4" Widescreen LCD). You might need to experiment with the values to get a 4:3 (unstretched) picture on different resolutions/monitors, but I hope this helps!

[juuser]

Thanks so much for this! I couldn't get any Media Player to work, but this does. It's a shame it's command-line based, but as long as it works, making a BAT file isn't hard.

it shouldn't be, since all should be self explanatory in my post...atleast i think so...but there's also GUI (Graphical User Interface) version of it - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . Haven't tried it tho, maybe it's better if you're not into making those bat files...but i think that fps would be mess then again. If you try, then let us know :)

[Cheesy1]

Yeah I just used the sample Batch file you gave and edited it to give the correct Aspect Ratio. I wonder if the GUI version has an FPS editor in it? Would probably be more hassle than just running the BAT file anyway.

[franpa]

thanks for pointing out the gui version..... that works like a charm : )