How to de-bug the movie-bug?

[Herr Ping]

Hi guys, in my setting the movies let's crash the game immediatly (especially in the very first start, so I had to manually disable the movies in the ini-files). But I really would like to enjoy the movies as I once did a long time ago.
Has anyone news what is needed to play the movies? I guess I need some today not supported movieplayer or so.

[Induktio]

Without further information hard to say what causes the movies to crash while in the game (could be some specific windows/hardware combination). But if you want to watch the movies separately from the game, there's at least two options.

* Open command line on movies folder and use playuv15.exe to watch the videos.
* Install latest VLC Media Player and open the wve files directly (easiest way, also codecs should be supported without any additional plugins).

[Herr Ping]

The problems with the movies seems a common problem, so I hoped that there is a common solution - the best way to see the movies is where they belongs to, during the game.
But anyway, I tried my VLC (v3.020), it don't recognized the files.

[Induktio]

It might be possible to try additional config options in the ini files to fix things but it's somewhat unlikely to affect this issue here. Without further debug information it's not really possible to say what might be causing it. Another option would be to install the unofficial binary patches since some of them will affect how the movies are played (Pracx, Thinker Mod). Installing only Scient's Patch probably will not change this.

The game videos (wve filetype) should be playable on VLC Media Player. This was tested on two different systems and they worked using the default VLC installation. There were no custom extensions installed.

[pezenwever]

Originally posted by Herr Ping:

But anyway, I tried my VLC (v3.020), it don't recognized the files.

Very odd. Works perfectly for me with the same version.
Mayhaps a dumb question but are you sure you set the filetype to be opened with VLC ?

[Herr Ping]

I tried two ways to open the files - per "open with" and directly with the VLC "open file", in the latter case the folder was empty (say: no matching file found).
Whatever the reason, luckily we have youtube to watch the movies :) - and I forgot that 25 years ago I watched them with a 15-inch-monitor (or somewhat in that size) :D

[Herr Ping]

Update:
I recently had to learn, that installing the planetary pack includes the Alien Crossfire Add-on, but the game-start-buttion that was installed on my desktop was only the base game - with no link to the add-on; and it seems, that this base game is the very first v1.00 - later there was a patch.
After I found this and then found the aliencrossfire.exe I could start the full game. In this version the movies run. I don't know what's the reason - maybe the 1.0 was not completly polished for modern PC, but I found no more issues.
Happy to play :)