Ren'py Video, won't work? Please help!

[AriaRules!]

Okay so recently I've been trying to put a video into a ren'py game and it doesn't seem to be working. I've already tried MP4, AVI and WMV but when I run the game, and it gets to the cutscreen part it either plays the audio without the video while displaying a black screen OR just skip the video all together.

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$ renpy.movie_cutscene("computer.mp4")

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$ renpy.movie_cutscene("computer.avi")

Please help, and yes I do have a video converter.

[Blue Lemma]

I suggest reading this if you haven't:
http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/reference/Movies

AVI and WMV are not supported.

My personal experience with MP4 is that it's a troublemaker. Try Ogg Theora:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/TheoraSoftwareEncoders

[TrickWithAKnife]

Forum necromancy!

I'm having problems getting my videos to display.
So far I've converted my videos to .wmv, .avi (mpeg4 and another format that I forgot), and .ogv, all without success.
What happens when I try running the game, no video shows at all.
Here is the desperate code I'm using:

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init:
    image movie = Movie(size=(400, 300), xalign=0.5, yalign=0.5)

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    "aaa"
    $ renpy.movie_cutscene("test2newogv.ogv")
    # show movie
    "bbb"
    $ renpy.movie_cutscene('test2newogv.ogv') 
    "ccc"
    play movie "test2newogv.ogv"
    "ddd"
    
    
    scene black
    show movie

    play movie "test2newogv.ogv"

    "Wow, this movie is really terrible."

    "I mean, it stars William Shatner..."

    "... speaking Esperanto."

    "MAKE IT STOP!"

    stop movie
    hide movie

    "Thats... better."
  

Pretty much everything I'm using is copied and pasted from people who know a lot more than me.

Any ideas? I've wasted hours on something that should be very easy.

[PyTom]

Is there sound in the video? Ren'Py requires that each video have a soundtrack with it - even if the soundtrack is silent.

[TrickWithAKnife]

Ahh, that must be the problem. I'll post later if I get it working.

[TrickWithAKnife]

It works, but the performance is.... not realistically usable.

[EwanG]

I seem to recall the one game where I used video I went with MPEG-1 which was reasonably acceptable.

Does it have to be video? With some of the animation techniques you might be better off just letting RenPy animate your frames.

[TrickWithAKnife]

For the opening to the game, I hoped to use an edited video. I guess it could be possible with images, but I wonder if that would cause any problems. There may be up to 500 images in the sequence.

[PyTom]

Images will be much less efficient than video.

[TrickWithAKnife]

Resized to 400x300, I'm getting about 5FPS on a test video. If I run it the same size as the window (1280x760) the image never changes from the first frame.

Basically I think this performance problem makes video not usable for what I want.
The alternative of displaying 500 images in sequence sounds like a nightmare to code, but it may be the method that gives the best looking result.

[PyTom]

What sort of system are you running on where you're getting 5fps? It strikes me that something is more severely going wrong there - either the video encoding is wonky, or your system is malfunctioning. Do you have GL acceleration on?

[TrickWithAKnife]

AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core QL-60, 1.9GHz
2GB RAM
DirectX 11
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
WIndows Vista Home Premium (Service Pack 2)

As for GL acceleration, I wasn't able to find out how to check if it's on.

I'm not sure if it's 5FPS. But I'm certain it is not getting as high as 10FPS, which is still much less than required for a smooth video.

I have no trouble playing the exact same video through other programs. I tried encoding with MPEG-1 as EwanG said he had reasonably acceptable performance, but it made no difference for me.

[PyTom]

Can you resize the window? If you can't, then GL isn't working.

[TrickWithAKnife]

Yup, it resizes fine. All art assets resize correctly at the same time.

[fluxus]

Forum necromancy!

I have an issue which sounds very similar to the above, thus the necromancy.

I use the ogv format, made with Free Video Converter for windows. Its 'Html5' conversion makes an .ogv video as well as 2 others.
180p and 240p works fine, 360p and above shows a couple of frames and then stops.
I'm going to edit out sound and add a silent track for the final version, but for testing purposes I let the audio track remain as is.
The window was resizable when using 240p, and I was able to swap to fullscreen too.

How high a resolution is Ren'Py supposed to be able to handle?
And which video conversion tools are you using/would you recommend?