can you play .ogg directly with the snd_ commands without the need of a filter? i thought whenever you play .ogg in gamestudio you need a filter installed previously.

this is straight from the manual:

For playing .ogg files, an installer for Ogg Vorbis DirectShow filters (oggds0994.exe) is included. Install them by starting the exe. The Ogg Vorbis filter was created by Tobias Waldvogel (http://tobias.everwicked.com ) and can be freely used and distributed for private and commercial purposes.

thanks for clearing this up, if you can play .ogg without a filter with the snd_ commands than this passage is a bit confusing in the manual.

Well, the passage is written under media_play, so i guess that's alright. The snd_ functions don't use DirectShow filters but an internal ogg player afaik, so you don't have to install anything. The reason someone would use media_play according to the manual is if you want to stream your files (snd_create loads the whole thing in memory), play other formats than wav and ogg, and play stereo sounds(it does suck that snd_ don't support stereo...)


Cheers,
Aris

Using OGG with the snd_ commands does not help much. OGG is decompressed and then remains in memory with full uncompressed size (can be several 100s of MB!) Not very useful for background music.

The media_ commands stream music and video...

Hi,
finally i had some time to work on this (Damn, i must get rid of this crazy monkey in my room, he really distracts me from work). I've created a simple movie player, so you can test it with your ogg theora videos. Its still very buggy, so please report any problems (though there are no bugs, never, i call them issues )

Download
Usage:
Just copy your ogg theora videos to the same folder as the theoratheatre.exe.
You can convert you videos to theora using Super(c) for example. You can also download 2 sample videos here:
Elephants Dream HiQuality 278mb
Elephants Dream 59mb


Features so far:
- multiple decoding of theora videos
- supports vorbis as sound stream
- pause
- stop
- play
- quit
- mouse cursor (ehm, whatever)
already there but not in this demo:
- vorbis sound in a different file then the video

CAUTION: THIS APPLICATION USES SHADERMODEL 1.4!
(colorspace transformation on the gfxcard is way faster then on the cpu)

uh, i musst stop here, the monkey need some food.

ChrisbB

err whats wrong with WMV?

dont get me wrong, its a great plugin, and im really curious about testing it, but till now i am using wmv and was happy with that, so whats wrong with that?

wmv isnt a good video codec, and shows some stretching, and it's low quality, the interlacing is really bad...

i am interested in this ogg filter, it seems very good, and i'm a fan of ogg encoding, so keep up the good work

This is a nice piece of coding.
But I am struggling to understand how this would fit into a game.
If I understand what you are doing, you want to use OGG to play ingame videos, is this right?
Will your app plug into an existing game, or is it now a standalone?
Thanks for clearing this up.
Regards,

Thanks. Theora was always on my want list along with Speex but that's a different beast all together.

@JimFox: OGG is a container that uses Vorbis for sound (like MP3) and Theora for video. It's just an open video format an requires no licensing. Speex is an audio compression format from the same developers and is specially used for speech. It's high compression with good quality.