TalkingSoft.com Forums: Bink video problems - TalkingSoft.com Forums

Hi All

Nice site + forum btw, only just came across it, Also codecs are useful. Thanks! Anyways, My problem is this Bink video thing, apparently game companies use it to compress company logos and video in games and its practically lossless quality at all resolutions (I think thats what it does), anyway my problem is the Bink videos are not playing correctly, they are stuttering, for example Halo::Combat Evolved for pc, There are 3 company logos in the bik format, but one doesn't play correctly (bungie.bik), Basicly the video and sound pause all of a sudden, the video may be lets say 40% played and starts stuttering. I have googled everywhere for a bink codec and havn't found one, I tryed the ACE Codec pack, Its still messing up. Its not just halo messing up, Dead to rights, Kill.Switch and the punisher are doing it to on my pc to mention a few. These bik videos play fine on my bros pc and he has a lower graphics card! My card is a GForce FX 5700LE 256mb, not a "top spec" one but jesus, It should be plenty to play a small movie I have a good up-todate driver for gfx card
(Had to downgrade from latest driver for some gaming issiues, but vids didn't play even with NVidias latest driver), I tryed tweaking my gfx card settings, Nothing, Still the same problems.

My PC:
Pentium 4 2.4ghz
Win XP Pro SP2
768MB RAM
160GB HD space on 2 drives
GForce FX 5700LE 256mb
Realtek AC'97 Audio

Please help,

Regards,

Nick

Hello Nick!

Sometimes, you can rename .bik files to .mpg. Then use Windows Media Player to play them.

If you still can't play the files, get RAD Video Tools.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply Euromix, Unfortunately the Rad Tools install didn't do anything, The movies still stutter, Also they are useless movies (I don't care if i can't watch them with WMP) but its irritating in the game when they start to stutter,

Thank you

Nick

I'm having the same problem and can't find a solution. Just emailed tech support at groove games and am waiting for a reply. I'll post once I hear something

Did you try RAD Tools? They seem to work for some people

Side note: If do lots of gaming I suggest getting PCI- add-on sound card i.e. Sound Blaster Audigy 2. Less taxing on system for bandwidth.

Also, consider updating integrated audio codec and chipset driver for board. I had stutterring problems before and that usually fixed the problem.

Just finished searching through this forum to see if anybody else has experienced the same problems with certain games.. the choppy video problem on cut-scenes has been driving me nutty. Well I'm not sure this is gonna work for everybody but it has definitely solved the problem for me. Here is what i did.

I searched C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 for the binkw32.dll file and found that there was not one there. If you find that the file is already there check the version numbers against the one that is in the game folder and replace it with the lastest version if possible.

Next you need to register the DLL in your system registry by running REGEDIT.EXE from the command line - just click Start-Run and type 'regedit' without the quotes in the open box. I'm sure most of you already know how to do this but just in case I'm giving full instructions. There is always someone who doesn't know how to do this, eg. 'my idiot brother' - lol

Find the line that say HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and expand the tree by clicking on the plus sign to the left of the entry. Proceed downward in the list and find SOFTWARE and expand that tree in the same manner. There should be quite a few entries in this location and I recommend that you do not mess with any of them unless you know what you are doing and why.. unless your like me and can't keep your hands off of them and then I would suggest Selecting the branch you wish to change by clicking and using File-Export to create a backup of these files should anything go wrong. Actually you should always Export the branch you are changing, its a good practice and eventually you will thank yourself.

Ok already - I'm getting to the fix in just a second..

Scroll down and expand the tree labeled Microsoft.. (hope you can figure that out by yourself this time.. if not just click the plus sign to the left of the entry that says Microsoft.. zomg!! please don't ask me what scroll means..)

Locate Windows and expand.. and CurrentVersion.. and finally to SharedDlls
Now click on the folder and go to the right-pane of the editor.

Here is where I suggest that you do a quick search to see if there is already a binkw32.dll file associated if there is right-click the entry and select Rename and change the entry to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\binkw32.dll or the location for the binkw32.dll file (preferred location is %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 -- %SYSTEMROOT% being the location of your WINDOWS directory that way if you ever decide to uninstall the game you will still benefit from having localized your binkw32.dll file..)

Ok - so you say there isn't an entry for binkw32.dll - no sweat - just right-click on a blank area in the right pane and select the New option.. left-click DWORD value which will add a new entry at the bottom of the list. Change the entry New Value #1 to the location of the binkw32.dll (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\binkw32.dll) -- now right-click the the entry we just created and select Modify and make sure the Value data is '1' -- click Ok

Close Regedit and fire up the game..

Update:

This did solve the choppy video symptoms but the sound has problems after an extended amount of time.. It's quite possible that the file from Creative is out-dated and needs to replaced -- check later -- hopefully i will a solution for this also

Devilhead

Hey there,

Ok, so I've been having problems with .bik files too (still am). I went through the install and registry of the binkw32.dll file and all that fun stuff. No change for me. Video stutters horribly while audio plays perfectly. Anyway, I updated many drivers that I though were up to date, but found that they werent. Once updated, a very slight improvement, but nothing major. I decided to fiddle with my computers bios a little bit. After several hours of restarting and changing settings, I found that when I lower my AGP graphics aperture memory, the performance improved drastically! The down side to this is that the game I was testing on (rise of legends) dumbed down my ingame graphics settings. I balanced my system at 256MB to accomodate to having the max graphics settings while minimizing stutter (which it still does pretty badly, but not as bad as before). This appears to me that bink files utilized cpu usage instead of gpu. As the graphics aperture is lowered, that allows the cpu more memory then it had before and improved the bink playback. It seems illogical to me that they would make a video format dependant on the cpu over the gpu. Anyway, I'm at my wits end with .bik file formats. I've used this same computer for the past 4 years and it seems like they work well sometimes and not at all other times. I have been able to play bik files ingame just fine for several games. From what I've gathered across the boards is that windows, esp SP2, have alot of problems with this format. Tech support is minimal and to make things worse, the movies are being put into the menu screen so that it slows down the main menu along with the options screen and setup screens. So, I would appreciate any feedback on my hypothesis and hopefully we can get this format worked out.

BTW, I dont have the most current video card drivers. I have the latest ones that I can install and get to work on my system. There is really no updates since these drivers anyway as the newer drivers are for SLI support and have nothing to do with my setup. Anyway, I have an nvidia 6800GT and am using drivers 78.01. I cant get anything newer to install and run properly. The issue is that I install the driver, restart and the computer boots up, goes through the windows loading screen, but normally it goes black and then shows the mouse - in my case goes black and hangs. Never actually gets to the light blue login screen. Its a weird bug and I cant solve it. Anyway, bfg was no help with this issue at all. They said, jsut use the latest drivers that worked. Such is life.

Thanks for any help and suggestions and I hope this proved somewhat useful!

Not sure if this was mentioned already (didn't see it from a quick read), but it fixed others' and my problem with Oblivion game:

Our CMOS' fast write option was disabled. It needs to be enabled, then the issue was fixed.

Thanks for the info the fix helped a little a little less stutter but still there. This began when I upgraded to XP a Few years ago. I thought it was my sound card that was no longer supported by XP except for buggy user drivers. Upgraded the sound card and the same thing. After some reading I found out that bink vid. is CPU intensive, which is odd. You'd think that it would rely on the GPU. I have an older system 766 so it looks like I have to wait for a new system. THing is the movie files run super bythemselves with rad tools. Just $uck$ in full game. Thought about maybe trying a newer version of the blk.dll. The only .dll with rad tools I see is bkmaker.dll 1.8 Not sure if that is the same as bklw32.dll Keep at it people we can fix this.

Hi

I had same problem for a while now and found the problem for my PC. I got a AMD Cool 'n Quite CPU and when power scheme not set to Always on, bink videos stutter.

Hopes this helps.
GGMan