Hello you lovely compressed masterpieces, thank you for watching. Pinning this for anyone wanting to unwrap their thoughts on how i/the videos can improve in the future.
channel with a couple thousand subscribers: releases video with better production quality and editing than even some big content creators Genuinely, video is amazing. Script is concise (modern youtuber be like: 36 hour video essay), what you're cutting to and how you're cutting to it is very nicely done, and of course the most important thing of all, your timing, feels very refined. Been making vidjayo's myself since I was 9 years old BUT I can't particularly find any good tips to give you(on a single watch at least). So overall very nice job my friend.
Holyyy!! Really? Compression technologies just doing the work in the background eh! I can’t even fathom the sheer amount of data that’s compressed and decompressed on a regular basis. Modern day marvel and nobody bats an eye. Or is that just me.
also using bink video makes the videos unable to play without the software, meaning that players can't accidently stumble upon the ending to their game
@@shoeliver it's not just VLC, any player using ffmpeg as their backend (e.g. Media Player Classic and its derivatives, anything else based on LAV filters as well) can play most Bink video files...
Bink used to be a true godsend back when video codecs weren’t really designed for fast decompression. RAD Game Tools truly employs some of the brightest minds in the industry - however, nowadays generic formats like AV1 or WebM/Matroska designed by literal armies of people specializing in video compression and video compression only have more or less made Bink obsolete; there might still some advantages, but for most it’s not worth the licensing cost.
The number of people behind a technology doesn’t have any role in what’s obsolete or cutting edge. In tech/sci inventions, Literal armies of professional workers have NO significant advantage over a couple or even one bright mind. More manpower is only advantageous for manual tasks.
@ No, because design is iterative. When trying to solve a technical problem, having more people able to explore new possibilities can lead to a more optimal result faster.
Bink is a pretty hacky codec, but it had a crucial advantage in MPEG1/2 era that it actually decoded quicker, which was kinda necessary. But quickly became pretty moot, because during video cutscene, nothing else of note is happening, and processor performance grew quickly. Then it was able to sort of keep up on quality-compression by tweaking the hpel and other algorithms. But foremost it was unburdened by patents and royalty free... and given most studios had running contracts with RAD for one reason or another, it was cheap to use. It never gained foothold on consoles, it's mostly a PC only thing. The cost of video codec license was simply baked into the game console's cost, and the platform SDK came with a system specific one. For the longest time Bink couldn't even compare favourably to VP8 so was used mostly by inertia. The story with video compressed assets is something we've seen before from the same company RAD, with their Smacker codec in the 90s, early 2000s.
As someone who has been doing game technology for over a decade, I absolutely LOVE the premise of this channel/series, buuuuut… I wish sometimes the research was a bit more in-depth and up to date in some regards. There’s just a whole bunch of small little details that aren’t quite right or missing. I’d recommend you maybe talk to someone in the industry regarding having a quick glance over the scripts. (I’d be open for it mysef, though there are certainly more qualified people available) Besides that, great work, I hope you continue!
I appreciate the feedback! And with each video working on being more and more accurate and having a better research workflow. But you mentioning “to reach out” gave me an idea. Thank you. Will continue to make things to the best of my ability, lots to do and learn!
dude this is a gem channel, 13 days from 50 to nearly 2k subs, with your quality your gonna reach to the highs of tech youtube and game stuff, keep up the work, i know im a little late to the start-up party but ill mark myself as an early bird still if ya dont mind, and dont forget me ty ty
Appreciate the heck of you my guy, it’s been a pretty cool few days seeing it happen. Now it’s time for me to make some more videos that hopefully y’all enjoy! Thank you!
@@Rill-2b you just cooked up a fire recepie for a channel, no wonder why you blew up this fast. mix of luck (algorithm) but also the good choices for things, like how u make videos. editing, environment, and wayyy more. legit thought when i came across your short/video i thought it was like a million sub channel because of the quality and how things were structured and made
3:29 Movies actually do have to run and play in realtime, no frames skipped. It is just that movies were usually played when the PC was not doing much else, and video game cutscenes do the opposite. Plus back then, the resources would be much more limited. You could not necessarily count on a player's PC being able to decode 640*480 video compressed with MPEG-4 while running a game at the same time.
I think he's talking about the latency from starting to play the video to getting frames on the screen. This can be longer for traditional video codecs as you have more state to manage, frames can be decoded out of order etc.
FUUUUUUN FACT! THERE IS A BINK 2!!!! These are their words “And even cooler, Bink 2 can be much faster than Bink 1, due to its multi-core scaling and SIMD design (up to 70% of the instructions executed on a frame are SIMD). It is really fast - it can play 4K video frames (3840x2160) in 4 ms PCs and 11 ms PS4/Xbox One using the CPU only (or 1.4 ms PC and 2.3 ms PS4/Xbox using GPU acceleration)!”
Wow, I watched this video and it was exactly what I have been wanting, then I click on your channel and see 2 more videos that fill that exact same niche. Instantly subscribed haha, good shit.
I remember the first time I ever learned of Bink and the .bik file format. I think I was about 10 years old at the time and I was screwing around looking at the game files for Battlefield: Vietnam. The game used Bink for the intro cutscene, the background video clips that played on the main menu, and a number of audio-only .bik files that contained the music tracks that played on each map's loading screen. I never understood what exactly Bink was or did at the time, but it's interesting to see it's one of those pieces of tech that was (and still is) just about everywhere, at least under the umbrella of gaming.
Compression is trading space for time. Using a mathematical algorithm we can change raw data into instructions on how to recreate the data, but the instructions take up less space. However, running the algorithm takes time.
If you look at the developer credits in many casino slot machines, you'll see Bink there as well. Had no idea how relevant they were until I saw this video.
Physical compression, like packing a suitcase, isn't accurate to data compression. Only packing what you need would be more accurate. My analogy is a shopping list: Each item is specified with how many of each to get, compared to listing the name of the item however many times. What you leave the store with is the contents of the list after decompression. While there's much more to it than that in most formats, transposition based on or referring to previous data, like Byte Run Compression as one example, is commonly used across many formats including for video like keeping the background the same across consecutive frames, maybe with some adjustments as necessary.
Fun fact about a game that uses Bink: the PC port of a famous visual novel called Steins;Gate uses Bink, but unfortunately the compression is _really_ bad for some reason. So someone took the files from the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version and re-did it, but they had to use the free version of Bink to make it compatible with PC so the files for it are comparatively huge in order to not be bitstarved lol.
I used to modify a lot of Wii/Gamecube games, and sure bink is the most used. Not just for cinematic, but also clips in-game. I always wonder why they don't used like .gif for that, but now it''s clear that bink is more efficient even with audio
Not to mention that the wizards that made Bink, were also tasked by Sony to make the dedicated decompression engine for the PS5. I love if someone goes to their website and isn't aware of what they are making, will just look at it and go "man, what kind of cheap fake thing are they making?". Bink, Smacker, Miles sound tools, Granny...
the valve logo portal 2 ending and the episode trailers are all played through bink valve is one of the biggest users even though they don't make cutscenes
Most Just Dance games before Just Dance 4 use Bink, and Just Dance 1-3 and the Black Eyed Peas and Michael Jackson spin offs Wii Bik videos, and when put in VideoPad Video Editor (which works with bik video files without add ons) or VLC, they are pre transparent.
Certainly cutscenes are mostly real time also Bink is now part of epic so the logo won’t be seen on the back of the box anymore. But bk2 file is still used for intro scenes such as the new Indiana jones game or the menu in stalker 2. BINK sneaks into places!
I remember in the 90’s and 2000’s trying to watch gameplay clips from the official websites and needing to download something specifically for bink. Think it was Final Fantasy, and other Eidos games
If Epic owns Bink, then they could very well open source whatever version of UE was used in the original Unreal. I know that the current UE5 is source available, but you can't just load up the original Unreal and get it working, especially considering the massive changes and incompatibilities between 3 and 4. Not to mention, with a restrictive license, you can't modify the engine. It may sound weird, but I really want it to be open sourced. If I could play it natively instead of using WINE, it would be so much better.
Now if only the cutscenes themselves were a higher bit rate. Tomb Raider 2013 I'm looking at you. Don't get me started on mid to late 2000's games like Turok 2008.
2:15 You talking about h264, h265 and av1. But highlights the vp9 codec in the Video (vp9 is currently also used much more than av1) 3:08 You are Speaking about DVD and CD, but shows a Blu-Ray disk c'mon
@@Rill-2b I said that because we can see the camera beiing controlled by the player at the end of the clip, which would indicate it's a reel time cutscene. That's strange
@@jeanneosecourand you are correct it goes into gameplay, while Batman puts his gear on it seems pre-recorded and when the camera starts to go into the wide shot of the city, it goes back into gameplay. Gameplay starts after the save ui pops up. At least that’s how i viewed it, but certainly been wrong before.
I don't think performance hasn't been any issue on nearly 20 years. It is more about availability of ready codecs or is there anyone in house who can make codec. Writing basic codec isn't actually hard. Theora codec was first codec without royalties and has been stable since 2008.
Whenever I play a local video with h264, h265, or AV1 encoding, the playback always starts instantly and theres no lag while the video plays. Was older hardware unable to instantly play back these codecs?
When bink video was made, there were none of those things. And even after video playback acceleration was readily available, many games sticked to bink for legacy purposes
Yep, these codecs were taxing to decode back in the day - it became easier with modern hardware, especially with GPUs that have dedicated hardware (H264, H265, and recently AV1) I recall my old Pentium 3 unable to decode Flash Video reliably that I have to recode them to MPEG1 to watch them.
Oh thank god, I’ve been wanting info on Bink Video for YEARS, it’s as difficult to find documentation about as the Havoc engine!!!! edit: oh nvm it’s not that type of video srry
Any device that isn't a calculator or brick phone can instantly decode H264 and H265 up to 1080p. Bink is only popular because it has a dedicated toolkit.
@@krusty07 thanks friend! sometimes a gut feeling says "damn, that coulda been better" small thing but matter imo, ngl though finding the clip of BL2 "Im the conductor of the poop train" made me laugh out loud haha.
Thanks I had a nice laugh when you said EPIC cares about optimization.. The same company that has been pushing against true optimization, they just love to ignore and spit in million of developers faces... they actually get off on it... but in the end if you want to know more you gotta research it yourself 👌
Are they forcing less and less optimized software form one interaction to another on purpose? I wonder to what end? What would they gain by doing that? Sure I’ve seen bad patches or companies that over promised, but is this something that’s within their corporate mandate like some hardware companies to forced obsolescence. Do you have any sources or leads I can look into to lean more about, thank you for your write up.
I remember seeing Bink way back on the ps2. (it may have been available on even further back on the ps1 but i don't remember) I don't think there is any other codec that can boast native implementations for PS2, PS3, Dreamcast, Xbox and so on. Back then, hardware was like the wild west, no standards and every console had their own unique architecture, back then, console exclusivity made sense because the because the engine had to be designed from ground even run on these consoles, let alone leverage the different chips for extra performance. So you want video on console? You'd better cough up some serious dough for those licensing fees. As to why they use the codec on PC? Well some games are released on both PC and console and implementing a separate decoder just for PC is kinda dumb. Though these days, consoles have become so similar to PC's, and has so much power that the decoding overhead between h264, is negligible and all consoles have native h264 decoders available on the hardware level. Even if there isn't one available, all consoles nowadays are running an x86_64 architecture (Excluding the Switch which is running ARM, but may still have a hardware decoder) and recompiling a decoder is trivial.
What's you take on commercial engine "addiction" :V these days it feels that everyone is throwing the food from their fridges and only eating outside(engine speaking). plus can you do a history of cryengine, unreal, unity, etc.
So why is the last dragonborn in the thumbnail? Correct me if i'm wrong (and i'm pretty confident i ain't), but skyrim doesn't have a single cutscene. Hardly has a handful of scripted events that could count as cutscenes like the intro or getting paralyzed by mercer. Or was it just a stylistic choice of video game character
It’s referring to Bink video as a codec which Bethesda used in Skyrim. Edit: if you look at the back of the box it’s in a smalllll fine print “uses Bink Video, copyright blah blah blah”
@@Verchiel_ right? I find it super neat that these technologies just appear in random places, someone commented that the monitors in game for the portal games use bink for the display playback. Fun how people find unique uses and it’s all in the background unknown to most of us.
The same devs (RAD/Epic) do have texture/data compression suite called Oodle and Kraken, respectively, and been used on many games. Problem is that 4k/8k textures are really really large, and current engines use image-based texturing (PBR) that’s practically multiple texture files to represent material properties. imo texture streaming (opt-in) is a good compromise but yeah there should be smarter ways to utilize these tools and techniques.
Using DRM means you're taking a 30% performance hit, can't waste any time decompressing data, just load it from the disk! You all got NVMe drives, right? 👀
So Bink Video can't use in their in house game engine like Fox Engine or Frostbite? Also can't implemented third party game engine like Unity, Cryengine and Unigine?
Technically anyone can license Bink - though idk if RAD still actively do - so it’s possible, but it does have a hefty license fee, and Bink isn’t quite as big a deal anymore as it used to be
to be honest the bink 1 codec is really really bad, even uncompressed lossless source material is reduced to a mess of makro blocks at least with the free RAD video tool that is out there, maybe there is a commercial tool out there for bink 1 that is achieving better results but a few gigabyte for a couple of minutes that looks so awful is what you get with the free tool they offer which is btw the only way so far to get custom videos in Skyrim
Bink is pretty meh in terms of being an efficient codec, incredibly inefficient and a pain in the arse to re-encode, especially re-encoding revisions of the Bink 2 codec prior to the "KB2n" revision (circa Epic's acquisition). H.264 and H.265 are finally becoming viable for use in more commercial projects, and the day Bink is finally dropped will be a bless-ed day. The only positive now that Bink has been acquired by Epic is that commercial projects using Unreal have a much easier time with licensing a video codec.
And yet if one decides to add a mp4 file into unreal engine games, it shits itsefl for some reason. Or at least this was the case of UE4 Games, Did not check with UE5. I'm no gamedev but as a player tutorial videos legit uses 101% of my CPU while the rest of the game is way less than that.
It’s been a hack of a ride not going to lie! I hope you likein’ the videos, if you have any comments or suggestions happy to listen and improve! Much appreciated friend!
@@Rill-2b HI Rill, Liking it so much and it's for sure more than 80% accurate, anyway some suggestion since you are into gaming tech new and old, How about, software rasterization/rendering and or clever algorithms, like Fast inverse square root, or acceleration using x87 to sse2 and avx. (no gpu accel) or WARP. voxels. etc. and or video games engine ahead of its time like trespasser or elite.
Can you explain why modern pre-rendered cutscenes look so much worse than ones in the PS3 era? I was playing Stalker 2 and the intro video legit looked worse than a 240p UA-cam video…
unreal is doing more corner cutting than innovation these days, a bunch of far more intelligent than me youtubers are talking about how nanite or lumen are basicly just cutting corners to look good but are really not optimised at all lol.
People just like to shit on whatever they perceive as the industry leader at the moment. It has nothing to do with the actual quality and issues of whatever product they decided to not like, it's purely about the position in the industry.
@@NeovanGoth Because industry leading software sucking is a much bigger problem than some random indie dev's hobby project sucking. UE5 has serious optimization problems, and nanite and lumen are big parts of that.
Oh I’m sorry about it, it compressed files to a size that allowed for fast playback on devices that did not have the power to process very compressed files. Bink is also used in games to display videos like on monitor screens, helps reduce size of files but does not take too much horsepower to decode. Hope that helps!
Hello you lovely compressed masterpieces, thank you for watching. Pinning this for anyone wanting to unwrap their thoughts on how i/the videos can improve in the future.
channel with a couple thousand subscribers: releases video with better production quality and editing than even some big content creators
Genuinely, video is amazing. Script is concise (modern youtuber be like: 36 hour video essay), what you're cutting to and how you're cutting to it is very nicely done, and of course the most important thing of all, your timing, feels very refined. Been making vidjayo's myself since I was 9 years old BUT I can't particularly find any good tips to give you(on a single watch at least). So overall very nice job my friend.
When you realize that some Valve games only used this for their Intros
Real time cutscenes for the win.
They also use it for menu backgrounds (L4D series and Portal 2) and in-game video panels (Portal 2)
I'm pretty sure they also use it for the Eli monitor conversation you have at the very beginning of Half-Life Alyx
@ they have switched to using webm for Source 2 iirc
@@mirumizureisn't webm basically bink with less compression😆😆
Funfact, Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Librty Ending Cutscene (wich is 5m37s) takes 104gb after decompression. Before its only 700mb
Holyyy!! Really? Compression technologies just doing the work in the background eh! I can’t even fathom the sheer amount of data that’s compressed and decompressed on a regular basis. Modern day marvel and nobody bats an eye. Or is that just me.
@@Rill-2b i mean this video would be 71.4GB if it was fully decompressed
also using bink video makes the videos unable to play without the software, meaning that players can't accidently stumble upon the ending to their game
@@shoeliver thats very cool! Great safety feature eh!
Except you can playback .bik files with VLC by forcing it in many cases.
@@DragonOfTheMortalKombat well i would think that a good majority of gamers dont have VLC, but I did not know that VLC can read .bik files
@@shoeliver When some games doesn't work on my pc I just watch their cinematics
@@shoeliver it's not just VLC, any player using ffmpeg as their backend (e.g. Media Player Classic and its derivatives, anything else based on LAV filters as well) can play most Bink video files...
portal 2 uses bink for the ending cutscene and the in game monitors!
@@jonathankrzeszewski9010 ohhh neat-o, the monitors would be a great use!!
In-between chambers only not the ones with Wheatley or glados
I believe Valve's own ident videos are also encoded with Bink
Bink used to be a true godsend back when video codecs weren’t really designed for fast decompression. RAD Game Tools truly employs some of the brightest minds in the industry - however, nowadays generic formats like AV1 or WebM/Matroska designed by literal armies of people specializing in video compression and video compression only have more or less made Bink obsolete; there might still some advantages, but for most it’s not worth the licensing cost.
The number of people behind a technology doesn’t have any role in what’s obsolete or cutting edge.
In tech/sci inventions, Literal armies of professional workers have NO significant advantage over a couple or even one bright mind. More manpower is only advantageous for manual tasks.
@ No, because design is iterative. When trying to solve a technical problem, having more people able to explore new possibilities can lead to a more optimal result faster.
@@nolram You are confusing the manual work of exploring design ideas with the cognitive skill of inventing new ideas.
I mean also alot of CPUs nowadays have built-in decoders for the generic video compression formats. So thats also part of it
@@danny-jo1rb not CPUs, GPUs, but you need those anyway.
Bink is a pretty hacky codec, but it had a crucial advantage in MPEG1/2 era that it actually decoded quicker, which was kinda necessary. But quickly became pretty moot, because during video cutscene, nothing else of note is happening, and processor performance grew quickly.
Then it was able to sort of keep up on quality-compression by tweaking the hpel and other algorithms. But foremost it was unburdened by patents and royalty free... and given most studios had running contracts with RAD for one reason or another, it was cheap to use.
It never gained foothold on consoles, it's mostly a PC only thing. The cost of video codec license was simply baked into the game console's cost, and the platform SDK came with a system specific one.
For the longest time Bink couldn't even compare favourably to VP8 so was used mostly by inertia.
The story with video compressed assets is something we've seen before from the same company RAD, with their Smacker codec in the 90s, early 2000s.
This comment is what i wished the video would've been. Thank you for actual insight.
The bink logo brings back a lot of memories from my childhood but I never knew what it was until now lol
LoL, I can't imagine seeing a logo repeatedly and not figuring out what it is AND how it works.
As someone who has been doing game technology for over a decade, I absolutely LOVE the premise of this channel/series, buuuuut… I wish sometimes the research was a bit more in-depth and up to date in some regards. There’s just a whole bunch of small little details that aren’t quite right or missing.
I’d recommend you maybe talk to someone in the industry regarding having a quick glance over the scripts. (I’d be open for it mysef, though there are certainly more qualified people available)
Besides that, great work, I hope you continue!
I appreciate the feedback! And with each video working on being more and more accurate and having a better research workflow. But you mentioning “to reach out” gave me an idea. Thank you. Will continue to make things to the best of my ability, lots to do and learn!
im going to give this a shot, we'll see if it works or backfires, but posted the topics of the next script outline in the community tab.
dude this is a gem channel, 13 days from 50 to nearly 2k subs, with your quality your gonna reach to the highs of tech youtube and game stuff, keep up the work, i know im a little late to the start-up party but ill mark myself as an early bird still if ya dont mind, and dont forget me ty ty
Appreciate the heck of you my guy, it’s been a pretty cool few days seeing it happen. Now it’s time for me to make some more videos that hopefully y’all enjoy! Thank you!
@@Rill-2b you just cooked up a fire recepie for a channel, no wonder why you blew up this fast. mix of luck (algorithm) but also the good choices for things, like how u make videos. editing, environment, and wayyy more. legit thought when i came across your short/video i thought it was like a million sub channel because of the quality and how things were structured and made
The production value for such a small channel is insane
@@SabrinaSandford hey! Thanks so much trying my best!
3:29 Movies actually do have to run and play in realtime, no frames skipped. It is just that movies were usually played when the PC was not doing much else, and video game cutscenes do the opposite. Plus back then, the resources would be much more limited. You could not necessarily count on a player's PC being able to decode 640*480 video compressed with MPEG-4 while running a game at the same time.
I think he's talking about the latency from starting to play the video to getting frames on the screen. This can be longer for traditional video codecs as you have more state to manage, frames can be decoded out of order etc.
Love the content. Hope you continue!
Oh thank you so much! Will Continue to improve and make more!
If Bink is so good, how come there hasn't been a Bink 2?
Checkmate
FUUUUUUN FACT! THERE IS A BINK 2!!!!
These are their words
“And even cooler, Bink 2 can be much faster than Bink 1, due to its multi-core scaling and SIMD design (up to 70% of the instructions executed on a frame are SIMD). It is really fast - it can play 4K video frames (3840x2160) in 4 ms PCs and 11 ms PS4/Xbox One using the CPU only (or 1.4 ms PC and 2.3 ms PS4/Xbox using GPU acceleration)!”
It's always a delight seeing a game that used Bink. If you liked making AMVs using game cutscenes, it was easy to rip and use.
I still remember times when Smack video codec (Bink's ancestor) was the default choice for video game cinematics.
I feel old.
And that was only 256 color video if I remember correctly, dithered at best.
Yep. Then again, back then a lot of the games themselves only had 256 colors as well.
Wow, I watched this video and it was exactly what I have been wanting, then I click on your channel and see 2 more videos that fill that exact same niche.
Instantly subscribed haha, good shit.
Yup had to come back to comment same exact thing happened to me :D
I remember the first time I ever learned of Bink and the .bik file format. I think I was about 10 years old at the time and I was screwing around looking at the game files for Battlefield: Vietnam. The game used Bink for the intro cutscene, the background video clips that played on the main menu, and a number of audio-only .bik files that contained the music tracks that played on each map's loading screen. I never understood what exactly Bink was or did at the time, but it's interesting to see it's one of those pieces of tech that was (and still is) just about everywhere, at least under the umbrella of gaming.
You're very concise. I like it. Subbed.
So much awesome is compressed into these videos!!
@@James-op6lstook me a while to unwrap this comment, but I see what you did there 😬
I really love the content produced, thank you for these awesome videos
Thank you! Happy you enjoyed it!
6:13 "Compression is making BINK things small. Decompression is making small things BINK 😏"
3:08 THIS IS SO CURSED
yeah ☠️
Compression is trading space for time.
Using a mathematical algorithm we can change raw data into instructions on how to recreate the data, but the instructions take up less space. However, running the algorithm takes time.
Very well articulated! Thank you for the explanation🍺
If you look at the developer credits in many casino slot machines, you'll see Bink there as well. Had no idea how relevant they were until I saw this video.
your videos are so great
Appreciate that! 🍺
Physical compression, like packing a suitcase, isn't accurate to data compression. Only packing what you need would be more accurate. My analogy is a shopping list: Each item is specified with how many of each to get, compared to listing the name of the item however many times. What you leave the store with is the contents of the list after decompression. While there's much more to it than that in most formats, transposition based on or referring to previous data, like Byte Run Compression as one example, is commonly used across many formats including for video like keeping the background the same across consecutive frames, maybe with some adjustments as necessary.
Fun fact about a game that uses Bink: the PC port of a famous visual novel called Steins;Gate uses Bink, but unfortunately the compression is _really_ bad for some reason. So someone took the files from the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 version and re-did it, but they had to use the free version of Bink to make it compatible with PC so the files for it are comparatively huge in order to not be bitstarved lol.
I used to modify a lot of Wii/Gamecube games, and sure bink is the most used.
Not just for cinematic, but also clips in-game.
I always wonder why they don't used like .gif for that, but now it''s clear that bink is more efficient even with audio
Not to mention that the wizards that made Bink, were also tasked by Sony to make the dedicated decompression engine for the PS5. I love if someone goes to their website and isn't aware of what they are making, will just look at it and go "man, what kind of cheap fake thing are they making?". Bink, Smacker, Miles sound tools, Granny...
Website straight out of 90s tools used in 100s of thousands of projects! Love it.
the valve logo portal 2 ending and the episode trailers are all played through bink valve is one of the biggest users even though they don't make cutscenes
well, not anymore. Source 2 uses WebM instead of Bink
I like how you keep in mistakes in speaking. Makes the video better!
0:16 digital circus intro prediction
Most Just Dance games before Just Dance 4 use Bink, and Just Dance 1-3 and the Black Eyed Peas and Michael Jackson spin offs Wii Bik videos, and when put in VideoPad Video Editor (which works with bik video files without add ons) or VLC, they are pre transparent.
With the prominence to real time cut scenes I don't see bink anymore on ps5
Certainly cutscenes are mostly
real time also Bink is now part of epic so the logo won’t be seen on the back of the box anymore. But bk2 file is still used for intro scenes such as the new Indiana jones game or the menu in stalker 2. BINK sneaks into places!
Hoping you mention Lost Odyssey's opening cutscene transition to gameplay on the 360!
Does your audience truly require a definition of the word "decade"?
i was always wondering what this bink logo is for
today found the answer
thanks
I remember in the 90’s and 2000’s trying to watch gameplay clips from the official websites and needing to download something specifically for bink.
Think it was Final Fantasy, and other Eidos games
From a website is strange, maybe you are talking about RealPlayer?
Great video always wonder about this logo as a kid
Thank you! That’s how the inspiration came, looked at the back of a game box and went. Mannn what are all these logos!?
I enjoyed this video!
Happy to hear! Thanks 🍺
THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! THAT'S WHY HE'S THE MVP! THAT'S WHY HE'S THE GOAT. THE GOAT!!!!
Ubi-art also used bink for the ubisoft intro and the beginning and ending cutscenes for Rayman Origins and Legends
If Epic owns Bink, then they could very well open source whatever version of UE was used in the original Unreal. I know that the current UE5 is source available, but you can't just load up the original Unreal and get it working, especially considering the massive changes and incompatibilities between 3 and 4. Not to mention, with a restrictive license, you can't modify the engine. It may sound weird, but I really want it to be open sourced. If I could play it natively instead of using WINE, it would be so much better.
Now if only the cutscenes themselves were a higher bit rate. Tomb Raider 2013 I'm looking at you. Don't get me started on mid to late 2000's games like Turok 2008.
That's one of the biggest reason how Bink keeps video files small and fast to decompress ;-)
2:15 You talking about h264, h265 and av1. But highlights the vp9 codec in the Video (vp9 is currently also used much more than av1)
3:08 You are Speaking about DVD and CD, but shows a Blu-Ray disk
c'mon
Wait, isn't that batman cinematic an in-game cinematics? Why would it use Bink's?
from what i've found that the cutscenes are all pre-rendered going through the steam forums.
@@Rill-2b I said that because we can see the camera beiing controlled by the player at the end of the clip, which would indicate it's a reel time cutscene. That's strange
@@jeanneosecourand you are correct it goes into gameplay, while Batman puts his gear on it seems pre-recorded and when the camera starts to go into the wide shot of the city, it goes back into gameplay. Gameplay starts after the save ui pops up. At least that’s how i viewed it, but certainly been wrong before.
@@Rill-2bBoth your examples of Batman and Mass Effect cutscenes are in-game cinematics not pre-rendered.
I didnt plan to comment but after seeing a 5/7 reference i couldn't help myself.
got em! I sometimes chuckle while editing, glad it landed.
I don't think performance hasn't been any issue on nearly 20 years. It is more about availability of ready codecs or is there anyone in house who can make codec. Writing basic codec isn't actually hard. Theora codec was first codec without royalties and has been stable since 2008.
I have a feeling this channel is going to be big soon.
One thing I hate about pre-rendered cutscenes is their low quality and how Bitrate starved they are.
Prince of Persia SOT Trilogy
Whenever I play a local video with h264, h265, or AV1 encoding, the playback always starts instantly and theres no lag while the video plays. Was older hardware unable to instantly play back these codecs?
When bink video was made, there were none of those things. And even after video playback acceleration was readily available, many games sticked to bink for legacy purposes
Yes your modern system not only is way more powerful but also has dedicated decoders for those formats
Man were you born in 2012?
Yep, these codecs were taxing to decode back in the day - it became easier with modern hardware, especially with GPUs that have dedicated hardware (H264, H265, and recently AV1)
I recall my old Pentium 3 unable to decode Flash Video reliably that I have to recode them to MPEG1 to watch them.
Oh thank god, I’ve been wanting info on Bink Video for YEARS, it’s as difficult to find documentation about as the Havoc engine!!!!
edit: oh nvm it’s not that type of video srry
anyway iirc VLC has support for .bik files
On my Kodak, yeah, know dat.
if only epic games spent so much effort into optimizing their game engine, and not allow studios to slack off with tacked on shit like nanite
Any device that isn't a calculator or brick phone can instantly decode H264 and H265 up to 1080p. Bink is only popular because it has a dedicated toolkit.
bro, i thought i watch a video from a youtuber with millions of subs
AFAIK "Bink" stands for "binary-key".
Re-upload ?
yeah, that first clip of HL2 was an oversight and couldn't just leave it in there.
@@Rill-2b aaaah i didnt minded it
@@krusty07 thanks friend! sometimes a gut feeling says "damn, that coulda been better" small thing but matter imo, ngl though finding the clip of BL2 "Im the conductor of the poop train" made me laugh out loud haha.
Thanks I had a nice laugh when you said EPIC cares about optimization.. The same company that has been pushing against true optimization, they just love to ignore and spit in million of developers faces... they actually get off on it... but in the end if you want to know more you gotta research it yourself 👌
Are they forcing less and less optimized software form one interaction to another on purpose? I wonder to what end? What would they gain by doing that? Sure I’ve seen bad patches or companies that over promised, but is this something that’s within their corporate mandate like some hardware companies to forced obsolescence. Do you have any sources or leads I can look into to lean more about, thank you for your write up.
Yes
I remember seeing Bink way back on the ps2. (it may have been available on even further back on the ps1 but i don't remember) I don't think there is any other codec that can boast native implementations for PS2, PS3, Dreamcast, Xbox and so on. Back then, hardware was like the wild west, no standards and every console had their own unique architecture, back then, console exclusivity made sense because the because the engine had to be designed from ground even run on these consoles, let alone leverage the different chips for extra performance. So you want video on console? You'd better cough up some serious dough for those licensing fees. As to why they use the codec on PC? Well some games are released on both PC and console and implementing a separate decoder just for PC is kinda dumb.
Though these days, consoles have become so similar to PC's, and has so much power that the decoding overhead between h264, is negligible and all consoles have native h264 decoders available on the hardware level. Even if there isn't one available, all consoles nowadays are running an x86_64 architecture (Excluding the Switch which is running ARM, but may still have a hardware decoder) and recompiling a decoder is trivial.
What's you take on commercial engine "addiction" :V these days it feels that everyone is throwing the food from their fridges and only eating outside(engine speaking). plus can you do a history of cryengine, unreal, unity, etc.
This guy playing GT6 on XBOX 360 and I think it's wonderful 😂
Someone caught it I see 🤣🤣
i know in GTA 4 the TVs used bink files (you'd find out when trying to mod some Tv or Show into the game Tvs
Oh that would be a great use for sure! Love the “in plain sight” uses. Thanks for sharing!
So why is the last dragonborn in the thumbnail?
Correct me if i'm wrong (and i'm pretty confident i ain't), but skyrim doesn't have a single cutscene. Hardly has a handful of scripted events that could count as cutscenes like the intro or getting paralyzed by mercer.
Or was it just a stylistic choice of video game character
It’s referring to Bink video as a codec which Bethesda used in Skyrim. Edit: if you look at the back of the box it’s in a smalllll fine print “uses Bink Video, copyright blah blah blah”
@Rill-2b huh, as it does, all for the bethesda logo on launch.
Bizarre
@@Verchiel_ right? I find it super neat that these technologies just appear in random places, someone commented that the monitors in game for the portal games use bink for the display playback. Fun how people find unique uses and it’s all in the background unknown to most of us.
I was actually thinking about bink video yesterday and wanted to research it. thank you
Hold up... Epic is a small company? Their valuation is bigger than Ford Motor Co.
it was a joke
3:09 why are you putting a ps3 game in a 360?
Special trick, plays back videos at 2x speed 😬🤣
BINK
So it is still Bink that make UE5 games under wine/proton cuscenes borken :/
Bink isnt used that much in the ps5 generation
I bet ive watched it before
Second time’s the charm 😬 this video is the black cat from the matrix. Dejavu
If only game devs continued to compress....
Salty about 300gb files? I think it all perfectly optimized with no bloat. 😂
They do, but the resolution of textures and the amount of variants for the same object (like skins in cod/Fortnite) is just insane
The same devs (RAD/Epic) do have texture/data compression suite called Oodle and Kraken, respectively, and been used on many games.
Problem is that 4k/8k textures are really really large, and current engines use image-based texturing (PBR) that’s practically multiple texture files to represent material properties.
imo texture streaming (opt-in) is a good compromise but yeah there should be smarter ways to utilize these tools and techniques.
They still compress, the resolution is just getting bigger.
Using DRM means you're taking a 30% performance hit, can't waste any time decompressing data, just load it from the disk! You all got NVMe drives, right? 👀
Yet many or even most games don't manage to play a bloody video without stuttering. How hard can it be to draw a picture every x milliseconds?
suddenly I feel old😂
You are amongst friends. Remember lift with your legs not your back.
4:55 ah yes, the first month of the year, Janauary.
?
What is it then ? December ?
It’s right after the March 22, then it’s Janauary the month of Jana, now sure what the issue is here. 😬
You mean, Jaunuauaury? xD
So Bink Video can't use in their in house game engine like Fox Engine or Frostbite? Also can't implemented third party game engine like Unity, Cryengine and Unigine?
Technically anyone can license Bink - though idk if RAD still actively do - so it’s possible, but it does have a hefty license fee, and Bink isn’t quite as big a deal anymore as it used to be
@@nolram Personally I would've just used H264 today - modern PCs can handle it very easy and it's 100% free ;-)
@ H264 is not patent free whatsoever… and it‘s quite old at this point
@@nolram Didn't know that it is not free. Bummer.
About being old - I know about that but it should have almost zero problems with compatibility.
Are you going to make a video about euphoria
It’s on the list to research. Currently (slowly) replaying RDR2 and in an awe for what happens on screen.
3:08 Umm……..that won’t work! 😂😂😂😂😂
to be honest the bink 1 codec is really really bad, even uncompressed lossless source material is reduced to a mess of makro blocks
at least with the free RAD video tool that is out there, maybe there is a commercial tool out there for bink 1 that is achieving better results but a few gigabyte for a couple of minutes that looks so awful is what you get with the free tool they offer which is btw the only way so far to get custom videos in Skyrim
And also owned by Epic Games hahaha
Bink is pretty meh in terms of being an efficient codec, incredibly inefficient and a pain in the arse to re-encode, especially re-encoding revisions of the Bink 2 codec prior to the "KB2n" revision (circa Epic's acquisition). H.264 and H.265 are finally becoming viable for use in more commercial projects, and the day Bink is finally dropped will be a bless-ed day. The only positive now that Bink has been acquired by Epic is that commercial projects using Unreal have a much easier time with licensing a video codec.
And yet if one decides to add a mp4 file into unreal engine games, it shits itsefl for some reason. Or at least this was the case of UE4 Games, Did not check with UE5. I'm no gamedev but as a player tutorial videos legit uses 101% of my CPU while the rest of the game is way less than that.
I would call these cutscenes "good" looking.
All cutscenes look shit to me; I can tell compressed video a mile away when comparing to locally rendered content.
Rockstar games doesn't use bink
That’s the cool think about Bink it just appears in random places, check out the back of RDR game box “Uses Bink Video Technology copy right …”
what. 1.76K subs, I was the 253th 10days ago.
It’s been a hack of a ride not going to lie! I hope you likein’ the videos, if you have any comments or suggestions happy to listen and improve! Much appreciated friend!
@@Rill-2b HI Rill, Liking it so much and it's for sure more than 80% accurate, anyway some suggestion since you are into gaming tech new and old, How about, software rasterization/rendering and or clever algorithms, like Fast inverse square root, or acceleration using x87 to sse2 and avx. (no gpu accel) or WARP. voxels. etc. and or video games engine ahead of its time like trespasser or elite.
Great information in the video but I feel like a lot of these jokes and cuts you used are straight out of the 2010s
There is a 50% chance it’s planned that way 😬 appreciate the feedback. 🍺
wtf is that writing at 3:04...
Words are hard, couldn’t read prompter fast enough. 🤷♀️
Do a video comparing Bink with CriWare
Actually, the videos always look awful so this encoder has been a sore spot in gaming for decades. Stop it
Can you explain why modern pre-rendered cutscenes look so much worse than ones in the PS3 era? I was playing Stalker 2 and the intro video legit looked worse than a 240p UA-cam video…
nostalgia
unreal is doing more corner cutting than innovation these days, a bunch of far more intelligent than me youtubers are talking about how nanite or lumen are basicly just cutting corners to look good but are really not optimised at all lol.
People just like to shit on whatever they perceive as the industry leader at the moment. It has nothing to do with the actual quality and issues of whatever product they decided to not like, it's purely about the position in the industry.
@@NeovanGoth Because industry leading software sucking is a much bigger problem than some random indie dev's hobby project sucking. UE5 has serious optimization problems, and nanite and lumen are big parts of that.
Ok, I know what Bink was made to achieve but I still don't know HOW it did, which is what I was expecting based on the title 🥲
Oh I’m sorry about it, it compressed files to a size that allowed for fast playback on devices that did not have the power to process very compressed files. Bink is also used in games to display videos like on monitor screens, helps reduce size of files but does not take too much horsepower to decode. Hope that helps!