CHAPTER 21 Bink

Bink, from RAD Game Tools, is the most popular video format used in PC and console games. And RAD has been in that business for years; Bink launched back in 1999, itself a follow-up to the company’s successful Smacker codec, which was already version 2.0 in 1995. Thus the codec, tools, and SDK are tightly focused on satisfying the professional game market. Bink does a fine, if unspectacular, job playing cut scenes, but its real strength is its extremely flexible SDK for incorporating video and audio into games as sprites, textures, or anything else for which a series of bitmaps can be used. The decoder itself is quite lightweight as well, leaving CPU power and memory to prepare for the next level while the video is playing. The ...

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