I was just thinking about Oblivion's epic introduction: several scenic shots of Cyrodil, mostly showcasing White Gold tower and the Imperial City itself. The narration by Patrick Stewart was also pretty nice.

It got me thinking. Do we have a means to convert a video to the format Morrowind uses for the few cutscenes it has? I know we have menu-video replacers, so I figured there must be something that did this out there. I thought it'd be neat to do a video with MGE that builds the opening sequence up a bit more, but I have no idea how I'd go about doing that.

Thoughts?

Hrnchamd mentioned in the Code Patch thread that he was having a look at how .BIK files are called (apparently anything larger than 640x480 will crash?). If it were fixed so that larger resolutions could play, and someone who was good with video editing wanted to take a crack at it, I think it could be neat.

Actually, I'd also be quite happy with a 1:1 copy of the original introduction but refilmed on a modern PC at high resolution

I found an "Unofficial Tribunal Ending Movie" around somewhere, was gonna try it out on my next run through - so if it works I would have to imagine this would be possible somehow.

Yep, it's possible. And easy! Morrowind uses http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm for its cutscenes. Just record your video, convert to bink, (it's free) and rename it mw_intro and it will play when you click New Game. There are also commands to play videos through a script.

That is correct. Hopefully, Hrnchamd will be successful (when has he not?) and we can bask in HD video madness!

I've replaced the opening original Bethesda movie for http://yfrog.com/0owatchingz

All you do is create your movie in bik format and then call it mw_intro.bik and drop it into your video folder in the datafiles

Bik doesn't play nice with all files - sometimes i've had to convert a file to avi and then reconvert to bik which is annoying quality wise - and why I've been asking Hrnchamd to have a look at the way the engine renders the bik files

I've noticed MGE doesn't play nice with bik files and I have to turn off my shaders at the start of the game in order to improve the quality

The Rad tools doesn't have much info on compression and settings - it takes a fair amount of experimentation to get a compromise between file size and quality - typically a 1 min video is going to be 60MB - I've discovered as a rule of thumb that 10 secs = 10mb - this may change depending on what Hrnchamd can achieve with improving quality of resolution etc in MCP

Veloth's Child is going to be amazing .

As far as video compression goes, I don't mind even an uncompressed format. Overkill, perhaps, but the bandwidth and hard drive space really don't matter to me.

Realistically speaking, servers have limits and some people have limited bandwidth, but even a high resolution video shouldn't be that bad. I'll have to play around with the RAD tools a bit and see what happens at my resolution (1680x1050).