What Formats can I legally use in my commercial games?
I mean, can I Use .Avi ? .Mpg? How does this work?
I think there is restrictions on mp3 .. that why there is .ogg right ?
You know this would be good to know so i dont get sued or any thing..

Thanks.

AFAIK, .mp3 is the only format that has (expensive) restrictions on it.
MPG, JPG, OGG, and all other 3DGS supported formats are legally in the clear.

Beware MPEG (MPG)..... There are licensing fees associated with MPG use.

www.mpegla.com

AVI is a wrapper for a lot of different CODEC's many of which require separate licensing...

Thus you see so many games using BINK for video....

Ken

Bink is great if you have lot of money or is that only if you don't want to display logo and credits?

Did NOT know that about mpgs! They are so pervasive on the net that I thought they were free to use... this means that just about every porn site is violating copyright laws... how immoral!

So BINK is to MPG what OGG is to MP3?

@Fastlane LOL, there are alot of MP3's on the web also.

There is a fee to use Bink, it typically is cheaper than the MPEG license, for commerical game use. It's certainly alot less confusing....

Indeo used to be the CODEC of choice for free to use video compression, Intel has since stop shipping Indeo on all windows systems. I think you can still use Indeo for free but you will probably need to add the CODEC driver installer to your install process...

If you can afford BINK, I highly recommend it.

Ken

with wmv you should be on the safe side. it's free to use on windows.

i think most licenses are only meant for the creators of hardware/software codecs (but you should check this for the codec you want to use! with some it's different.). if you don't ship your game with your own video decoder but use microsoft's directshow filters to play videos, then you shouldn't have to pay anything.

Hi Vent,

Yep WMV is OK, it's just so low quality it's rarely used in commerical games. XBOX uses a version of WMV called XMV, you can really see how crappy it is.

Please verify and be able to prove you have a license to use the technology to play video or music before you ship a commerical game. Your publisher will demand this in the contract.

Please do not just assume because it's free to use for personal purposes that you can then incorporate that tech into a commerical game, many times the rules change, when you start generating revenue utilizing that tech....

Ken

But tell me .. if i used the windows avi uncompressed .. would that be free ? or .. ? any one know for sure ^^ ?

Your movie would become xxx gigabytes if you save uncompressed avi's ^^