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The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation m
by danbolt 6y ago
The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation might cost more in developer time than simply licensing Bink. Bink's developers are also going to be more conscious of the technical limitations of a game console that you might be running into (eg: hard thread/socket/resource limits) compared to a more general-purpose codec.
This becomes a more notable tradeoff for a studio looking to get funding for a particular milestone from a publisher. Your technical leads (and content creators) likely also cut their teeth on games that integrated it, so it has existing operational momentum too.
- shmerl 6y ago> The free codecs might not necessarily be designed or optimized for the platform you're working on. Porting an open-source player for your particular situation might cost more in developer time than simply licensing Bink. This sounds like an artifact of the past. Today there aren't that many hardware platforms that free codecs don't already cover properly. And I expect with something like push by AOM this will become even less and less of an issue in the future. Codecs are becoming more of a commodity in this sense so something like Bink I expect will be less and less relevant.
- anthk 6y agoThat's true. Windows oriented developers don't realize libre codecs are everywhere, even under Windows and OSX. Ditto with graphic and text handling libraries, I am pretty sure Freetype or Harfbuzz exists on some way under Windows and OSX.
- pfranz 6y agoMaybe. Real time and production often has special needs general purpose tools don't cover. A lot of delivery codecs focus on things like lossy compression and buffering. I know from video production and computer graphics, delivery codecs are miserable to work with for reasons such as: not allowing arbitrary channels (if you only need 1 channel or maybe you need 5 for an alpha and bump map), playing in reverse, cutting in on arbitrary frames, different compression on each channel (lossy rgb, but lossless alpha), etc. My understanding is that Bink is often used for realtime playback of multiple elements integrated with the 3d environment (triggered explosions, HUD elements, streaming textures) so it needs to be performant, handle many simultaneously, and integrated with the engine since you'd be applying transforms and LUTs. It'll be nice if there are great, free, off the shelf codecs and tools, but at least right now almost every current AAA game seems to use Bink.