Thank to the efforts of Peter Ross we finally got Bink version b video support. Now I can stop nagging him about it and he may work on something else. I think it’s almost a year since we had game decoders added to FFmpeg, we should do that more often.
P.S. Why I say almost full? There is still some issue with audio in Bink-b, after Peter resolves it FFmpeg will have complete Bink decoding support.
Update: thanks to Peter’s effort we have full Bink-b support now, including both video and audio.
Nice that FFMpeg can now playback all those game videos using Bink.
I am surprised that Rad Game Tools havent tried to stop this work (given that Bink is one of their core profit centers)
Almost, there is still Bink ‘d’ outstanding ..
Jonathan: I work at RAD, and the short version is it’s not a problem.
The main selling points of Bink are its extremely easy of use, that it exists on virtually every platform, and that it’s small and uses very little memory for its work (almost all the memory used is spent on one planar YUV frame buffer).
FFMPEG is nowhere near as easy to integrate into a game as Bink, it doesn’t ship with pre-packaged video/audio support for all supported platforms, it runs on less platforms than Bink does, and it’s positively huge in comparison: Bink is a <200k DLL on Win32, current FFMPEG shared builds are closer to 4.8MB on x86 and bigger on PPC – that’s a huge deal if you’re working on memory-starved consoles.
Our customers already have plenty of alternatives if they don’t need Binks very high performance and low memory usage and don’t mind doing some of the “dirty work” themselves. Certainly on PC there’s plenty of ways to play back video and even most console SDK ship with some platform-specific video playback library. It doesn’t seem to hurt our sales 🙂