[TUT]Creating TV channels

[gr8man]

Hello people. Yesterday I found out how to edit the TV channels or even create your own TV channel. And because I’m not an egoist I’m going to tell you how.

 

The files of the channels are in .bik format. In fact this is a simple compressed video and this is the video which is shown on the TV in the game. The .bik format is developed by RAD Studios and there is a tool which can export and import the video content from the file.

 

What you’ll need?

 

1. RAD Video Tools – you can download it for free from http://www.radgametools.com/

2. Video file which is in 512x384 resolution – if it is in higher resolution it will cause a lag ingame

3. A lot of time, because the compressing is slow as HELL

 

What to do?

 

First, if you want you can encode one of the GTA’s channels (GTA IV Root folder ->Movies) just for example. You can do this by selecting the .bik file in the RAD Video Tools’ explorer and then by clicking on the “Convert a file” button.

In the next window you can adjust some settings but I prefer to use the default parameters. Be patient, the extracting is slow, but the converting into .bik is slower.

 

The real thing!!!

 

Now it is time to convert our video into .bik file. You can do this by selecting the video file in the RAD Video Tools’ explorer and then by clicking on the “Bink it” button.

Now you should type 650000 in “Compress to a data rate (bytes)”, this indicates the quality of the video. The higher this number is, the higher the quality will be and the slower the converting process will be, and vice versa. As I said before the converting is slow as HELL.

When the process is finished you can watch the .bik file or directly replace it with one of the GTA’s original TV channels. The channels’ folder is “Movies”, which is located in the GTA IV’s root folder. When you replace the custom channel with “Weazel” or “CNT” you can see the result ingame.