First of all thanks for the detailed reply. Last night I started to rewrite the page (before seeing your reply) because I figured that the codec pack was what offended you the most. The suggestion to use this pack came from the community and many people have reported success using it with Windows 10. I did state that I had never tried it in the instructions. I guess I should have been more clear that it should only be used if everything else fails.

This is the problem with not personally having a Windows 10 machine that has this crash issue. I can't personally test how to fix the problem and I must rely on what I read in forums.

You mean using this pack created problems for other games? Which game specifically if you don't mind me asking? I would like to include a warning about this pack but more info would be appreciated.

May I ask where does this information come from? People in the forums have reported success using the replacement XVID videos. I don't think what you are saying is accurate because there would only be a call to play the video and Windows itself determines what codec is required to show it. Windows would open the file and determine the codec required.

I don't have the source code to prove otherwise but if you have solid proof I am open to hearing it. I only want to help solve these problems for the community so the game can still be enjoyed by all. I have no problem admitting I was wrong.

One thing that I have come to the conclusion with the movie crash issue is that there appears to be several things happening. There doesn't seem to be a common fix for everyone. You may be 100% correct about registering the codec with Windows but unfortunately there isn't enough feedback from people to confirm.

As far as I can tell there are 2 issues causing a startup crash:

- unable to play the encoded movies
- some modern computers unable to do the lower resolutions required for Swat 3.

You mean using this pack created problems for other games? Which game specifically if you don't mind me asking? I would like to include a warning about this pack but more info would be appreciated.

Any game that needs the indeo codec (iv4, iv5) will be disrupted by third party video codecs, historically on windows 7 this was a 'soft failure' you'd just get a strange barber-pole screen with a message about the game's inability to access the requested codec, however in Windows 10 x64 it has become a hard failure, if the game(s) in question cannot get clear access to the exact codec the game will simply error out even if you have a perfectly capable third party decoder that can handle indeo video effortlessly.

May I ask where does this information come from? People in the forums have reported success using the replacement XVID videos. I don't think what you are saying is accurate because there would only be a call to play the video and Windows itself determines what codec is required to show it. Windows would open the file and determine the codec required.

I don't have the source code to prove otherwise but if you have solid proof I am open to hearing it. I only want to help solve these problems for the community so the game can still be enjoyed by all. I have no problem admitting I was wrong.

I am just telling you what the problem is specifically on Windows 10 x64 build "1607", take it or leave it, the game works without LAV filters installed and crashes with DXERR generic if they are installed.

Windows 10 is a moving target, what works on 1607 (July 2016) may not work at all on 2004 (April 2020) and worse yet the entire game could stop working without warning as windows 10 continues to devolve into pudding. Its why i don't update my windows 10 ever, i'd prefer to keep my archive of 2,400 games working properly.

One thing that I have come to the conclusion with the movie crash issue is that there appears to be several things happening. There doesn't seem to be a common fix for everyone. You may be 100% correct about registering the codec with Windows but unfortunately there isn't enough feedback from people to confirm.

Encoded movies not playing is a problem on Windows 98, 2000, XP, and Vista, Windows 7 and 10 however ships with all the needed legacy codecs (and you simply have to re-enable them due to security reasons).

Resolution issues are easily dealt with using DGVoodoo, Swat 3 will run the 3D portions of the game in any resolution you'd like with minimal modification (just change the config file), the menus as you know are hard-coded directdraw objects that require big dirty hacks to change the resolution of (as was common for many games from 1997 to 2002).

Point is I posted here to help, it helped someone, thats all that was needed.

Any chance you can give us details about how it went when you registered ir50_32.dll?

Were you able to use the RUN command or did you have to use CMD in Admin mode? Any errors while doing it? etc.

I just wrote a quick batch script when i went to package the game up for archival storage.

regsvr32 %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\ir50_32.dll

just put that in a bat, and run it, it worked fine, indeo was enabled.

that being said I do have User Access Control permanently disabled via registry and group policy, so i'd lean towards you have to run the above batch script as an administrator if you use vanilla windows 10.

I got all of the junk/garbage disabled on my windows 10 install, so i rarely have any of the issues people typically have with Windows 10 because mine acts more like windows 7, UAC tends to be a thorn in most people's sides when it comes to older games.

Update:

I decided it was time to upgrade my windows installation since i'd been using it for years.

So I went from Windows 10 "1607" to Windows Server 2019 "1803" (with the november 2020 update pack applied).

I followed my own instructions, registering the indeo codec using my batch script (and yes i had user access control disabled via registry, i have no idea if UAC would interfere with registering a codec or not)

The game works perfectly fine, all cutscenes play and the game works just as it did on 1607.

That is all the imperical evidence i can give you jim, two different Windows 10 based systems and the game worked fine using my instructions, no Xvid, no codec packs, just game (and using the existing indeo codec that is disabled by default in windows 10).

Thanks for the report!

I have updated the "fix page" recently to include your regsvr32 suggestion and also put a warning about the CCCP codec pack.

When I get some time I want to see if I can force one of my laptops to unregister the .dll and go through the whole process so I can document it better.

Naaa, most people don't have trouble playing the movies. I have installed Swat 3 on about 5 or 6 of my machines over the years and only had trouble with one. That was easily fixed though enabling 800x600 in the laptop's driver.