No matter what resolution I chose the regular intro movie always is stretched above my 16:9 monitor. The companys logo and the game itself is not stretched and presents itself in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio. Even when I play the movie directly in bsplayer the sreen is 4:3 and everything is all right. What can I do to make the intro look correct in the game itself?

This is because the game engine isn't what's running the videos.

If you look in the video folder, you'll find a program called "cutscene.exe." It's actually a renamed version of a "generic video player" of the era. I haven't managed to identify which one (yet).

The main program executable sends a command to run this program... something like:

"<game path>\video\cutscene.exe intro.mpg"

You can run the player from a command prompt, perfectly well.

I haven't tried this yet (but I'm thinking about giving it a shot... feel free to beat me to the punch), but there may be no reason not to simply substitute the stand-alone video player of your choice into the same location, renamed to the same name.

Unless the player sends some sort of unique "I'm done playing" message... which is certainly possible... I see no reason that this wouldn't work.

But... I haven't tried it yet because, frankly, I have more important things to spend my time on, and only looked at BR1 for the first time in a couple of years, today.

I know I have seen a thread about how someone (Ganni19-sometihng maybe?) did in fact substitute that media player with good results.

Sorry too tired to search for it myself but it had to do with getting all the videos to work on Linux.

Wow! More than 300 days later I have nearly given up hope that someone might have a solution to this. But patience is a virtue :) Thank you so much. I will definitely try to find a way to subtitute that player (maybe using a small free downloadable one) and post here if I had success. Also thanks to Themlen for telling me that there is somebody who already did this successful. This raises my motivation to try a lot.

After searching a bit with the informations I was given I found this. Seems as if the maker of this patch managed to let the cutscenes fill out as much as possible on a 16:9 monitor without stretching it. However he used an outdated version of mplayer which shows when using this fix. I downloaded the newest one and you will not notice that this was changed at all. However the newest one freezes a bit before the first logo. Will test other versions to see if there is a "perfect one" available.

Just out of curiousity, what versions of MPlayer have you checked?

I tried several versions from different years from here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerwin/files/MPlayer-MEncoder

I also tried 64 and 32 bit versions. Non worked completely the way I wanted it to work and after testing 20 or so versions I finally gave up.

Rats! :-( I wonder why it works so well for me, and I did nothing extra.

Two facts I think might have some relevance:
> I have VLC installed
> I have NO codec packs installed

I just tried out the "Mplayer" fix, and here's what I noticed.

1) THE GOOD - Clear video playback, and audio synced properly to the video.

2) THE BAD - the player is playing it in the original resolution, without any "adjustments." The desired approach would be to have the video "stretched" to a format which modern Windows (and monitors) really are designed to work with... say, 800x600 at the lowest, ideally 1280x1024. Or to put it into a "screen sized" window, with letterbox-style side black boxes, reducing the visual shape to a 4:3 box.

DOSBox does this very nicely, of course, so we all know it's entirely possible.

But... none of this OUGHT to be necessary. The fix is only a partial one, and a better player (which, either by default or by "commandline," corrects for aspect ratio so that videos are never "stretched" to a different aspect ratio) would still be desirable.

HOWEVER... this mainly applies to the opening video, and a small handful of other pre-rendered videos. The in-game cutscenes... which are the MAIN means of communicating story, as far as I can tell... render properly.

It's an annoyance. And I KNOW it's possible to fix, but I just don't have the time, resources, or frankly inclination to reverse-engineer this.

This is something someplace like GOG, which is reselling the game, ought to be able to create a fix for (since this is part of what we're paying for, isn't it?)

The solution is this mod: app.box. com/s/4yxfaeh23uk3t1ejv13sdxe1etn9ac86
You can use not only the MPlayer, but also another. Edit Cutscene.cfg

Thank you and sorry for the extreme late reply. Since you did not quote me, I was not aware about your reply at all so it was a mere coincidence that I looked again in this thread :)

I will test this asap and report my results.

If this really should work I will try to convince GOG to patch this into the game ... I don't have much hope they will do it, but I guess it is worth asking.

OMG - with the fix posted by Raf9600 above I finally managed to get the videos in 4:3 with black borders left and right just as it was originally intended. However I had to dig deep into the mplayer manual to figure out which command options I ihad to use. I had success by replacing one line in the mplayer.cfg as follows:

Command=-demuxer lavf -ao win32
Command=-demuxer lavf -ao win32 -vf scale

I tried all other parameters including those that are supposed to keep aspect ratio or force aspect ratio to 4:3. This was the only one that worked and now I have the correct aspect ratio, no stuttering, freezes, fixes or sync problems. :)

Nice work since the video is pretty nice.

Excellent. I'll give that a try sometime in the next several days.

Again, it's a shame GoG hasn't taken up the workload to do this... (sigh)

you can watch all cut-scenes on youtube in HD at my channel RXQ79 (it is impossible to post a links here, so I will just write names of the videos)

BloodRayne 2020 part 1 demo

BloodRayne 2020 part 2 intro

BloodRayne 2020 part 103

BloodRayne 2020 part 129 outro