I keep getting getting slowdown in the video during the middle of cutscenes. It runs fine at the beginning and end of them, but always seems to slow down in the middle.

I have this problem too. I'm pretty sure that it's not a hardware limitation, but I don't know what is causing it.

same for me

Same here!

Same thought it was just me. Glad its not.

Any fix for this as I cant find any?.

Task manager shows my CPU is running full tilt on the game, considering the upper requirements for the game is 1.8Ghz and i have 3Ghz cores, this shouldn't be the case.

It runs full strength all the time, if it were only during videos i'd suspect the bink decoder dll was to blame. I also get the slowdown when running from a ramdrive so it's not due to hard drive delays...

Another thread suggested forcing VSync using the display drivers, so i did... didn't help, same problem. I'm using AMD Catalyst so not sure if that means anything...

I get the slow down too.

Might be the game just isn't optimal for multi-cores?

If it's not optimal for multiple cores, it shouldn't matter as it defaults to using one core... And at the listed requirements the game shouldn't chug, it should be taking about 18% or less of my CPU.

The other thread with the VSync commenting suggests it's trying to output more frames than is necessary to work... Reminds me of the Quake one where the GPU was heating up hot because it was outputting 1,300fps, when forced to 60 it was quiet as a mouse...

I've tried replacing the binkw32.dll from the Witcher game's version and it made it a little more stable, for about 10 seconds longer of video before it dropped to 5 fps. Same thing happens when i minimize the window and then bring it up again, suggesting it's a buffering issue internally on the game?

This is really weird.

Same problem, just for the record. Haven't set out trying to solve it, if I do I'll post here.

Exact same problem here

Same problem, seems to happen after a certain time. If I skip the logos at the beginning I can get further into the intro before it happens.

I wonder. I know the game uses Bink video format since the binkw32.dll is clearly accessible. However i can't seem to find the actual videos. Looking for some tools it seems the dat files (above 0) are videos, but i'm not sure how you'd access them.

The thought I'm having, is i would re-encode the video at half resolution. Since i don't run it at full HD anyways, I've had decent success doing this with Divinity Dragon Commander. However locking the videos or encrypting them can only be an annoyance since if i can't re-encode them, then the smaller resolution won't make for faster decoding.

edit: using DaTool i could extract the first file, but the references to Bink and how it's encoded is missing...

[code]
universe/story/rules/episode_1.rules: uPlayBink("01", 0);
[/code]

edit:
Glancing at a bik file and then glancing at the dat files, i noticed something quite curious. I can probably decode 25% of it based on reoccurring patterns. Namely the encoding HAS to be a simple xor encryption; Simply cycling through a sequence that's fairly short (128 bytes), and relying probably on an offset of bits or bytes.

The image shown shows the last byte of 4 byte blocks that is almost always 0 during a long stretch of the header. Note the pattern repeats after 8 times going down. The other 8 are likely in the other interleaving blocks in one of the other red circled areas.

Most dat files use a different encoding (starting) point, but they seem to use a similar pattern. However the first 3-4 bytes of bink files are ALWAYS known, which is BIK?. (? could be one of the following letters b,d,f,g,h,i, specifying what version of the codec it uses, although it appears to be 'i')

see bink container

Been working on this, i almost have it decoded. However there's obviously something wrong with the decoding since there's something different about the first 2 bytes how they are encoded vs the last two in pairs of 4. Anyways.

408 should be 480
44124 should be 44100
57 is probably 1
and the 276/308 should be the same (probably) from what i understand from the container.