Videos quality?

[ForestDragon]

It's only for me, or the intro/cutscenes have poor quality? Strange, if I play them with Media Player, they are much better!

[Tesseract]

They're never going to look great on modern screens, given the resolution they were made for. Maybe your media player is doing some kind of post processing to smooth them? Not sure.

[MeierLink]

It's normal, they are very old videos.

But in it time ufff what good videos

[ForestDragon]

I checked the old Diamond Edition. Videos was better. Here I can barely see the subtitles...

[Chauci 𐛧]

OP is right Beamdog did mess up the scaling job which introduced blurriness in text
https://i.imgur.com/0i8hqn8.jpg

Basicly they just did this:
for f in *.bik;do ffmpeg -i $f -c:v libvpx -vf scale=660:600 -qmin 0 -qmax 50 -crf 5 -b:v 2M -c:a libvorbis -ar 48000 ${f//bik/wbm};done

[ForestDragon]

Yeah... aspect ratio looks 3:3, not 4:3. The game still good though....

[Chauci 𐛧]

I tried a few filters with ffmpeg and produced better looking videos but they still look off when played through the game so something seems to be happening in the engine as well.

The game is good sure.

Using the 1.69 4:3 (800x600 biks):

for f in *.bik;do ffmpeg -i $f -c:v libvpx -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:-1:-1:color=black" -qmin 0 -qmax 50 -crf 5 -b:v 2M -c:a libvorbis -ar 48000 ${f//bik/webm};done

[xXUmbrellaAgentXx]

Could you find an original high quality version of the video itself and just convert it to .bik yourself? I know they have a free program to make your own .bik files, I used it to re-scale, and interpolate Silent Hill 2 in game cutscene videos not even a year or so ago for my 60fps custom setup of the game via Enhanced Edition, and was able to create some very high quality videos for what I could find as reference. You could always use a video editor to set the crop and resolution to the best possible result then us the .bik program to make the final file. I've never tried it with this game so I'm not sure it would work, but worth a try.

You could also try using frame by frame exports, then upscale each frame with an AI upscaler, like gigapixel A.I. or ESERGAN, something like that, then put it back together in a video editor on the timeline matching the frame rate of the original video. That too can sometimes give better quality results. A lot of work, but if done correctly definitely worth it.

But like Ser Pounce a Lot said, if it is indeed the game engine itself causing some quality problems, not sure what can be done about it. I am still in awe that the stuttering and jitters happening when assets and characters come into view, is still occurring even in EE. Seems to be a memory cap issue, back then I think I used a 64mb GPU, and that the texture memory was indeed capped at that for the engine, but been so long. It's even worse when using the new Beamdog HD Armors and such that just released.

[Tesseract]

I don't think EE can actually play Bink video; all the included movies are now WebM. The point still stands though, something could be improved with how the video was converted and how it's scaled and displayed in game.

[nightfright2k]

I kinda did what you were looking for. 1:1 conversions of the DE BIK files. No upscales, but also no cropping in return. Definitely better than what comes with the EE.

D/L link in the comments section of Symphony's Overkill Cinematics[neverwintervault.org]

(To install, unzip the "movies" folder into your Documents/Neverwinter Nights directory.)

[Wizard of Woz]

My question is why? Why would anyone take the time to do this?

[nightfright2k]

The real question is: What are you still doing here?