has anyone had any luck in resolving the flashing bue screen problem, ive had this for ages and its annoying me

only thing i can suggest is to re-encode your videos. best format is: 128x128 15fps 256kbps "VP60 Simple Profile" video, 56kbps, 22,050hz, stereo Mpeg 3 audio. thats what i used for my movies and they show up really well. barely no slowdown ingame and comparable quality to the maxian channels.

well, i have d/lded a moview off of here and that was 128x128 but not to sure about th bitrte and framerate tho, unfortunatlt adobe premier pro cant change the visual size, so could you post a small movie for me to download and test? this would be grate thanks again

here ya go.

and for future purpose: VirtualDub is a great program for this kind of video work. it can resize and re-encode as needed. i used it for all my movies.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

kool thanks, ill try that in about 5 days, im away in japan at the moment, thanks again, ill let you kbow how it goes.

What?!? I didnt get any of that!! Its so frustrating theres people out there that know how to do something on SimPE and they wont make it SIMPLE!!! For example the first step it says select Object thing. When i open up SimPE theres nothing in that box on the left hand side

Please make it simpler

??? Sorry I aint good at anything but major making... where do you open your custom , telivision channel.package from?!

Thx
Simmygurl
P.S Prothoss you need to click on plugins or something, I dunno.

1. It appears that you did not pay attention to the download in the first post of this thread that says "Custom Television Channel.zip". Download that file (I uploaded it for a reason ).

2. It appears from your post that you also did not pay attention to the entire sentence in the first step in Post #2

Another suggestion I might add: Please do not encode avi files using DIVX as the DIVX tray icon will force your game to swtich back to the desktop to show itself and currently there is no way to disable the annoying little tray application.

Hey,
what do you change the guid to?

Same here I'm having problems with the GUID. I'm guessing you have to go to the SimPE homepage and register but I dunno.

Yes you have the register the GUID through SimPE.

Hmm... Think I may have found a fix for the 'flashing blue screen' issue.

Tried a few things, but first off, here's my setup:

Sims2 + EP (University)

A) Went through the tutorial (thanks 'eric etc' btw) a few times, and noticed I had used a few capitol letters when naming my INI handler in SimPE, don't do that. Use all lower case if possible (I'll explain why in a minute). Feel free to use upper case all you like when naming your radial menu text, but for the ini handler/tag, no caps...

B) Went through my broadcast.ini files (all of them, the one in 'my documents\EA GAMES\blah blah blah\', the one in program files\..\Sims2 University\, and the one also in the Sims2 directory, but I highly doubt the one in the Sims2 directory is the culprit, like stated earlier, better safe than sorry) and I made sure that my tags which I changed earlier (made them all lower case in SimPE) were also lower case in the INI.

If you look through all of the other tags in the broadcast.ini file, you will notice that Maxis' are all lowercased, perhaps this matters not... but after editing mine... all of a sudden it works... even after several hours of trying what everyone else has tried here.

Just a thought...



Also, on a side note... you'll notice this switch:

"CommercialInterval=XX"

It may seem obvious, but this is the length of your TV broadcast before the game automatically tries to cut off from one video file, load a commercial, then load another video file from within your 'station' directory.

I just converted every Robot Chicken episode (which are around 10-11 minutes each) and thusly set my CommercialInterval to about 600. Haven't had any problems with it so far.



In case anyone was wondering, I've tried a few different methods, and ended up sticking with 'Vchat20's' settings for video/audio compression/conversion. I tried it with DivX as well, but for simplicity's sake (I converted dozens of large videos all at once with VirtualDub's batch mode) I ended up sticking with his method.



For advice on using Virtualdub... I've been using it for years...

If you need to resize your source video down to 128*128, do the following:

Take your source video (mine was 320 wide by 240 height) and divide the larger number (320 for me, and for standard NTSC stuff, will always be the width) into 128. (128/320=0.4), this gives you your conversion multiplier. Take your other number (240 which was the height) and multiply it by the conversion multiplier (which was 0.4 in this case). For me, I got 96. So, without adding bars to the top and bottom, my video frame size is now 128x96. In case that was kind of confusing (I've been up all night, and may not be making any sense at all) here's a formula for NTSC video 4:3 ratio:

w=width
h= height
c=conversion multiplier
x=height before letterboxing

(128/w)=c
(h*c)=x


Go into virtualdub, hit the video->filters menu, and select resize. Configure the filter. Input both of the numbers we just figured out (128w x 96h for me), then go down to the checkbox that says resize and letterbox image, check that box. Our letterboxed size will ALWAYS be 128x128. Preview it, and check out your new letterboxed (bars on the top and bottom, or left and right depending on the original ratio) video.

Hope this helps... if anyone is interested, I'll be adding some retro TV show intro sequences into my game as commericals (Thundercats, Silverhawks, Knight Rider, etc) possibly even adding a 'commercial' channel, for funny and worthwhile commercials made over the years (Superbowl commericals sound promising for this one) let me know if anyone would like these... maybe I can Rar/Zip them up.

-Coffee


Also, worth noting... I use Sims2Pack clean installer, and after everything was all said and done in SimPE, I made sure to open the *.package file with Sims2Pack and install my newly created package that way...

Again... Hope I helped in some small way...

Thanks to eric, for the very easy tutorial, and thanks to coffeehedake, too, for the solution about the Flashing-Blue-Screen.

Now my Sims have a Sci-Fi Channel, and can watch Stargate on the right Channel.

I used the VirtualDub tutorial for the test video someone posted and I still get the flashing blue. Can anyone help?

I. Am.So.VFrustrated. I have done exactly what the tutorial says and I still get the flashing blue screen!!! What the hell am I doing wrong?

Worst case scenario, try editing all of your broadcast.ini files (there should be at least 2 of them)... make sure you use only lowercase letters when making the reference to the tag to your broadcast.ini, and inside the ini, make sure you use all lower case letters.

Also, make sure you have the dummy folders set up too... need an empty folder that is the same name as the custom station in your \program files\EA GAMES\SIMS2\Movies\broadcast\ folder, or in the same folder in your University folder.

I have to say, it took me hours (all night) to finally get it working the other night, and I'm not exactly sure which step fixed it...

Oh ok so I need only one folder to have the actual clip in it and is that the one in TsData or under The Sims 2.

by me the lowercasesletters were the problem

The folder with the clip in it should be in your 'My documents' folder, as anything put in there (whether in the Downloads directory, movies, broadcast, anything...) takes priority over what is loaded from the game directory (as far as I understand it). So the game is checking in your 'my docs' folder before it checks what is in the actual game directory.

My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Movies\Broadcast\[YOUR TV STATION NAME HERE]

From what I can tell though, you at least have to have a dummy directory with the same name as the one in your my docs folder, in your game directory for it to work properly. Think of it like this, the game is trying to mirror the contents of your my docs folder into your game directory, but for the mirroring to work, it has to have the directory structure already set up, so you just need an empty folder named the same way as the other folder, and *bam* the game copies everything over.


I ran into a little snag with my Retro TV show videos... All of my source video is in Microsoft WMV format, which is basically illegal to transcode (or at the very least a pain in the butt). I found a converter online, but it's not free, and the trial puts a big watermark across the whole thing...

Quick question for Eric Etc: Any way I can add multiple new, custom channels in one package file? I thank you for your wisdom with the tutorial, after a little bit of working out the bugs, it works brilliantly. However, I wonder if you might know how to do more than one channel at a time, in one package file.

Thanks in advance Eric.

-Coffee

Hey I have made a channel and have got some avi files in the folder but In the game all i am getting are the commercials!
Also is there a way to change what the pie menu says because in SimPE i changed it to my channel name but i still get the default name! Please Help! :weep: :weep: :weep:

Hello coffeehedake,

EDITED: Originally, after reading your post, I had thought that multiple channels in one package might be possible. After reviewing the file structure in a television channel, it appears to me that each channel has to be a seperate package file.




Hey tomthedude,

Did you click commit before saving the change to the text list string? Sorry, I know next to nothing about avi files.

Thanks Eric, after posting that I played with the package file in SimPE for a while, and basically figured they needed to be in seperate packages. Glad to hear you came up with the same results too.

Have to admit, I'm pretty new to using SimPE, I'm going to cruise around the forums a bit to see if I can find an answer, but maybe you know off hand:

I'm wondering if I could possibly have sub-channels in the radial menus. Something like this:

ComedyTV -> Robot Chicken
|
\/
Stand-Up Comedians


Sort of like having 'On-Demand' television, where you can watch the show you want, but have them categorized by content.

The main reason I'd like to do this, is to have a bunch of 80's TV shows on my RetroTV station, but be able to choose between say, Thundercats and Knight Rider, or Silver Hawks and GI JOE.

I'm not sure if the TV channel selection menu is simply set up exactly like the conversational radial menus used to interact with other sims/objects/etc or if there is some special procedure for the Televisions. My theory is that they are set up in the same way as everything else in the game, and it would only be a matter of figuring out how to set things up in the package file and correctly defining things in the broadcast.ini.

If this works out, perhaps I can work on some new mesh for a Satellite/TiVo/Digital Cable Reciever object that we could release for custom channels.

I'm still trying to learn exactly how to get new mesh/objects into the game, but as far as the 3D modeling side of things goes, that should be a breeze. (Been doing modeling for years).

Well... Back to reading, I've got a lot to learn about

I was wondering how to do this,thanx