Which version?

[-==Kinderstock==-]

There are 4 versions of the game on the market with different video-quality/gameplay..which one is it on steam?
No info in the descripton...

[svenevil]

Probably they don't know it themselves... but I would like to know as well.

[Nalut]

I can't go full screen and the quality video is really bad. I don't see any video options..

I knew about 2 version. This one on steam seems very bad. I want a decent quality video. Wtf. I hope they'll fix it or something..and probably wont..

[dagstar84]

I assume this is comparable to the CD-Rom Version. It is like a 700mb download from Steam

[-==Kinderstock==-]

Originally posted by dagstar84:

I assume this is comparable to the CD-Rom Version. It is like a 700mb download from Steam

then it's the version with the lowest quality, that's sad ...:-(

[Thomas Baxter]

CD-ROM Version. Why? God knows.

[Thomas Baxter]

And where's their other one Point Of View? Never been able to get my hands on that one...

[Wudans Eye]

In my opinion its a DVD version. Videos running in 1024x768 ( I think?) resolution without interlace. I played a CDrom version before and video quality was much worse + interlaced.
Also, the controls are different than in the CDrom version. I cant move free through the house but need to use the map to change the room. Controls here looks remotecontrol optimized.

[Ripfin]

Steam version is uncensored
also android uses a smaller screen in turn makes the image more sharp

[BinarySplit]

Can confirm these videos were ripped from a DVD - their filenames follow DVDs' IFO/VOB filename conventions (e.g. VTS_07_1_V42C01.webm). They're encoded at about 800kb/s VP8 at 720x352, non-interlaced. The MPEG compression artifacts and VP8 re-compression artifacts are pretty obvious. However, even to a video compression geek, the picture quality is not so bad quality that it detracts from the experience.

[Defiant]

This is pretty clearly the CD-Rom version, not the DVD-Rom or DVD-Video versions. Disappointing.

[Defiant]

Originally posted by The Coyote:

And where's their other one Point Of View? Never been able to get my hands on that one...

That was only ever released on DVD-Video, AFAIK, which makes it less likely that it will be released on Steam.

[BinarySplit]

@Defiant The video files have definitely come from DVD, based on resolution (720x352 is a common DVD resolution, but VCDs and data files on CDs generally were much smaller due to having less space) & filename (That VTS_00_0 pattern was introduced with DVDs and hasn't been used elsewhere).

TLC was released in 1998, just before MPEG4's release, and it has 4 hours of video. With the best commonly available codec at the time, MPEG2, it would have taken 5+ CDs to store 4 hours of 720x352 video at anywhere near acceptable quality, but only 1 DVD.

Unfortunately the videos have been re-encoded with a modern codec (VP8) down to 500MB. Modern codecs can easily get 10x better compression than DVDs (i.e. a 500MB MP4 will often be better than a 5GB DVD) if encoded from the same source material, but re-encoding can't make quality come back, and 800kb/s is on the low end for DVD rips. You might be looking at those screenshots and thinking they look crap, and yeah, it's because DVD resolution has always been crap. If you think otherwise, it's nostalgia goggles. CD-based video was even worse. It's so bad I don't think anybody would tolerate watching it these days.

This release definitely still looks better than anything you would find on a CD back then, but there has been a small amount of quality loss from the DVD due to the re-encoding.

[ᴏᴠᴇʀᴊᴏʜɴɴʏ]

Originally posted by BinarySplit:

@Defiant The video files have definitely come from DVD, based on resolution (720x352 is a common DVD resolution, but VCDs and data files on CDs generally were much smaller due to having less space) & filename (That VTS_00_0 pattern was introduced with DVDs and hasn't been used elsewhere).

TLC was released in 1998, just before MPEG4's release, and it has 4 hours of video. With the best commonly available codec at the time, MPEG2, it would have taken 5+ CDs to store 4 hours of 720x352 video at anywhere near acceptable quality, but only 1 DVD.

Unfortunately the videos have been re-encoded with a modern codec (VP8) down to 500MB. Modern codecs can easily get 10x better compression than DVDs (i.e. a 500MB MP4 will often be better than a 5GB DVD) if encoded from the same source material, but re-encoding can't make quality come back, and 800kb/s is on the low end for DVD rips. You might be looking at those screenshots and thinking they look crap, and yeah, it's because DVD resolution has always been crap. If you think otherwise, it's nostalgia goggles. CD-based video was even worse. It's so bad I don't think anybody would tolerate watching it these days.

This release definitely still looks better than anything you would find on a CD back then, but there has been a small amount of quality loss from the DVD due to the re-encoding.

confirmed!

I own the DVD and the CDROM versions. The CD Versions videos are much lower resolution than this and interlaced. Also the controls from the DVD version are the same like here. The old first released CDROM Version was optimized for PC and mouse controls so this is the only version you were able to move freely in the house.

Only the DVD version used the map to move through the house.

[Futaleufu]

This version seems based on the DVD version, the problem is that the video is too compressed: the scenes with the red SUV, or the scene of Michael building the dog cage are full of compression artifacts.

[-==Kinderstock==-]

they made a down-convert from the original dvd for ios-release (shrinking video files to 700mb otherwise too large for ios) and then port it without changes to pc platform. so it is sadly a bad ios-port and has nothing to do with the original pc releases...

maybe someone knows a way to swap the low-quality video files with the high-quality ones from the original dvd? the filenames are different...