this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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In older times when in-game scenes weren't invented yet game studios often played Bink videos.
You need a licence for the codec meaning someone has to pay to play.
Wouldn't that someone be the game company, when they first made the game? I can't imagine games rely on some system library to decode bink, it must be embedded in engine. Besides, pretty sure bink can be played on vlc, so lack of free/open source decoders isn't the issue.
It's not just a FOSS issue; it's a software patent issue.
VLC doesn't attract a huge amount of attention because they don't really make any money and would just get forked if someone did try to destroy them.
However, larger distros with commercial backing (OpenSUSE springs to mind) often won't directly include potentially patent-infringing packages, so you have to get them from a quasi-third-party repo like Packman.
Vlc is also hosted in France, where software patents aren't legal.
France based
The codec is embedded in the game. You are not allowed to crack a game to make it play a video or reroute it to some other software. That's illegal.
?
Op is saying the cutscenes don't work in-game. Nobody said anything about cracking. And I'm saying if the problem was the lack of a system decoder that could easily be solved since there are free decoders available.
As I wrote the codecs were usually included in the game. No sane developer assumed that they are already installed in the system.
Now how do you get a game to not use the codec it's shipped with? By cracking.
If the codec was included in the game you wouldn't need to pay to use it. It was already paid by the developers.
Edit: not to mention modding games is legal in most cases
Having the runtime of the codec installed in a wine prefix is not the same as having it work. Just like wine has to work on the codec to get the data to it and output back to the game, in a way that the game, the codec and wines d3d implementation can deal with it. This is made mode difficult by some codecs doing output themselves and some handing buffers back to the game for display.
This is hard and gruesome work. With painstaking observing and duplicating behavior, since a lot is not documented and for a clean room implementation the person implementing it can not look at disassembled binaries or (hypothetical) code-leaks.
That is just wrong. "Cracking" is the circumvention of Copy-Protection. Before Denuvo afaik no Copy-Protection had data-integrty checks, so modification of game Behavior (aka Modding) did not require tampering with the Copy Protection. Best Example SKSE for Skyrim, a tool adding a lot of additional functions to the internal scripting language while still keeping copy protection in tact.
Isn't that more of a legal thing than a technical one?
Yeah. It is. But it's a powerful one. 😬
Kinda weird, typically there's always a... less than legal solution for problems like that, y'know?
If money is involved people will unsheath their knifes.