Posted September 10, 2014
high rated
Hello space buccaneers!
If you're like me, you haven't disabled in-game movies because of the story and immersion pieces (like docking/undocking from the base). The only problem is, the original videos are encoded in 4:3 format, with horizontal bars. If you haven't change the in-game video scaling settings, your movies are super-stretched horizontally and ugly looking. Well, I've decided to fix that!
It was really simple on paper (just cropping the bars in any video editor) but proved very problematic and in the end I've spend good 12 hours experimenting with codecs, de-compressing, re-compressing and pulling my hair out. With the most recent versions of BINK (the video codec used in I-War 2) I could fix the aspect ratio alright, but there was no sound. I've spent hours digging through the depths of the internet, trying to find the ancient RAD Video Tools version from the year 2000 (that's 14 years old piece of software!). When I finally found it, all went smooth from there.
I've done it mainly for myself, but I figured it would be stupid to hog the "mod" (if you can call it that) and not share it with other passionate pilots out there. So there you go! Check the attached image to see the difference between the original videos and the fixed ones on 16:9 displays (should look great on 16:10 displays as well, compared to the originals).
☆☆☆★★★✪✪✪ SECURE DOWNLOAD LINK FROM MEGA.CO.NZ: http://goo.gl/8g078X ✪✪✪★★★☆☆☆
Just replace the contents of the X:\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\movies folder (make a backup first if you want to) and enjoy! The zip file only contains the story videos and launching/landing sequences in .bik format, so you can rest easy - you can't code a virus into those.
Now don't expect any magic there, nothing that would change 640x480 videos into full 1080p because that's simply impossible - especialy since the game seems to have hard-coded video resolution limit and anything that doesn't fit 640x480 pixels will just be skipped as if it wasn't there. So it's still 640x480, but it fits the 16:9 screens perfectly after being scaled to full screen by the game and the videos are a tad sharper than the originals.
Hope someone out there is going to like those vids because I've spent way too much time trying to widescreenify them :)
Best regards and safe jumps,
MaxiM/PixelPolish
P.S. Does anybody know if there's a way to register on i-war2.com forums? Registration is disabled for whatever reason and I can't think of any way other than e-mailing the admin :/
If you're like me, you haven't disabled in-game movies because of the story and immersion pieces (like docking/undocking from the base). The only problem is, the original videos are encoded in 4:3 format, with horizontal bars. If you haven't change the in-game video scaling settings, your movies are super-stretched horizontally and ugly looking. Well, I've decided to fix that!
It was really simple on paper (just cropping the bars in any video editor) but proved very problematic and in the end I've spend good 12 hours experimenting with codecs, de-compressing, re-compressing and pulling my hair out. With the most recent versions of BINK (the video codec used in I-War 2) I could fix the aspect ratio alright, but there was no sound. I've spent hours digging through the depths of the internet, trying to find the ancient RAD Video Tools version from the year 2000 (that's 14 years old piece of software!). When I finally found it, all went smooth from there.
I've done it mainly for myself, but I figured it would be stupid to hog the "mod" (if you can call it that) and not share it with other passionate pilots out there. So there you go! Check the attached image to see the difference between the original videos and the fixed ones on 16:9 displays (should look great on 16:10 displays as well, compared to the originals).
☆☆☆★★★✪✪✪ SECURE DOWNLOAD LINK FROM MEGA.CO.NZ: http://goo.gl/8g078X ✪✪✪★★★☆☆☆
Just replace the contents of the X:\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\movies folder (make a backup first if you want to) and enjoy! The zip file only contains the story videos and launching/landing sequences in .bik format, so you can rest easy - you can't code a virus into those.
Now don't expect any magic there, nothing that would change 640x480 videos into full 1080p because that's simply impossible - especialy since the game seems to have hard-coded video resolution limit and anything that doesn't fit 640x480 pixels will just be skipped as if it wasn't there. So it's still 640x480, but it fits the 16:9 screens perfectly after being scaled to full screen by the game and the videos are a tad sharper than the originals.
Hope someone out there is going to like those vids because I've spent way too much time trying to widescreenify them :)
Best regards and safe jumps,
MaxiM/PixelPolish
P.S. Does anybody know if there's a way to register on i-war2.com forums? Registration is disabled for whatever reason and I can't think of any way other than e-mailing the admin :/
Post edited September 11, 2014 by -MaxiM-
