negativeliberty on 18/10/2010 at 16:20

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In their thousands they came
conquering new territories

Amassing great wealth and power
they made and destroyed worlds

Their deviousness only matched
by their vile tenacity

We must be very cautious
in dealing with them

Close observation must continue
-- Keeper Harrold, Treatise on Proprietary File Formats

So.. that old bugger has reared its ugly head again. I don't know if something in a Windows update messed with the Indeo codecs again but the videos in Thief Gold and TMA have stopped working,.. again, and none of the workarounds do the trick (including a clean install). I don't use codec packs and no measure of de/re-installing the Indeo codecs, both from the game disc or the various links in the FAQ (and including the patches on TheCircle) or registering LGVID.AX (and Ir50_32.dll) can get Thief to play the movies again (including the latest DDFix, which autoregisters it on launch anyway).

Long story short: deathshadow's thread (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122477) here inspired me to do an encode of the Thief Gold movies (and afterwards I decided to do TMA too, and TDP by request) as close to lossless as possible, using a low range quantizer (0-16), a bitrate well over safe (you might call it overkill), and none of the VP6 codec's sharpening or noise reduction settings. Of course, low quantization also means bigger files, but I don't mind myself (if you do mind then go for deathshadow's TMA encode instead).

So if your Thief movies aren't playing again and none of the workarounds in the FAQ are working and you're just about pulling your hair out, cursing and angrily waving your fist at (http://ligos.com/index.php/home/support/indeosupport/) Intel/Ligos/Microsoft, here's a guaranteed (and permanent) workaround:

2016 - NEW MEGA.NZ LINKS:

(https://mega.nz/#!bUUlERrQ!OYyUlISA4m33vHwbKziefQPSK6iXCemjSE8jxZ6Klyc) Thief Gold encodes (571MB)

(https://mega.nz/#!aRsDgKKb!dAj6QawrZTelxW_6nq_r8fKMmLOdb1WpwRK0p2zi7Eg) Thief 2: The Metal Age encodes (530MB)

(https://mega.nz/#!2BtwiSCC!4gxFuF1UnM2mT4xU4WZ_wg8BiAqkBBLvce0Uv30o5RE) Thief: The Dark Project encodes (482MB)


Tools used: VP62 codec & VirtualDub.

I've included my VirtualDub jobslists (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1T8RPVW2) here if you want to have a crack at it yourself (or if you're too severely bandwidth capped to download these encodes but don't mind letting your computer do the encoding, readme included).

voodoo47 on 18/10/2010 at 18:39

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oh yes,the joys of megaupload.btw,did you know you can upload up to 1GB of files into a regular gmail mailbox,and share it with anybody? you would have to create two in this case,but thats not a big deal..

Stan_The_Thief on 18/10/2010 at 21:34

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Encode the Thief 1 (not Gold) videos as well, if you will.

CrisGer on 19/10/2010 at 05:33

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I just tried the encoded files for Thief Gold and they work like a charm thank you SO MUCH> this was a great act of generosity. much appreciated.

New Horizon on 19/10/2010 at 15:05

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This is to allow them to be seen in-game. If your OS has the codec installed, it will play them. Shouldn't matter to the game very much what codec they've been encoded with.