Replacing laggy menu movies with good ones!

Edit: The radar 'searching' animation on the matchmaking screen seems to count as a video and can't be removed by this method, so you will likely still have frame rate drops there.

So as many of you probably know by now, the background videos for COH2 are bad for menu performance. They only run at 30fps and the the menu is forced to sync with that low frame rate, leading to much frustrating lagginess.

There are plenty of threads on this site and others about how disable/delete the videos to uncap the menu frame rate. Basically, go to your Steam COH2 folder and find Company of Heroes 2/COH2/Movies

Then delete or rename the following:

flag_aef.lua
flag_westgerman.lua
flag_german.lua
flag_british.lua
flag_soviet.lua

But that's boring because then you only have a black background. So, I wondered about replacing the videos with some better ones. The existing ones are 720p at 30fps in WebM format. Therefore I searched for WebM files at 60fps in 1080p and downloaded one from gfycat.com. I replaced one of the existing WebM files, duplicated the name and loaded the game. Bam! I had a custom video playing in the background perfectly with the menu running at 60fps! You probably don't even have to replace the existing video, since the lua files let you specify the video name to load.

That brings us to this post. Does anyone know of any good HD 60fps+ COH2 videos that might make nice background videos for the COH2.org community? Close-up montages of units fighting would probably be the coolest.

Edit: Pics or it didn't happen



Second Edit:

Example Soviet video and instructions in below post.

lol. wow.

Community, fixing the game step by step. I knew you could just "delete" the vids, not that it would let you run "custom" ones lulz.

Does it solve the problem though? AFAIK people complained about having about 5 fps in menus before deleting files, not 30. If they had 30 nobody would complain.

Maybe these videos are run without gpu acceleration? Whatever is the reason, 60fps videos are only going to make it worse IMO.

If your menu is running at 30 fps with standard files you obviously are not experiencing the real problem.

Does it solve the problem though? AFAIK people complained about having about 5 fps in menus before deleting files, not 30. If they had 30 nobody would complain.

Maybe these videos are run without gpu acceleration? Whatever is the reason, 60fps videos are only going to make it worse IMO.

If your menu is running at 30 fps with standard files you obviously are not experiencing the real problem.

Yeah, if people can't run 30fps videos, they have bigger issues. But 30fps still makes for a lousy menu experience for the same reason it makes a bad game experience. There's a reason 60fps is considered the minimum acceptable.

60fps? I get 28 AFTER I deleted them...

60fps? I get 28 AFTER I deleted them...

All I can do for you then is to direct you to the links in my signature

nah, game runs fine, only the menus are awful

The only thing for me is that the when i start up the game the first 10-15 seconds in the menu will be lagy as ***. But that's it ^^
And those flags are so nostalgia so i just left them, all though this seems pretty cool

Deleted them long ago, I get around 40 FPS.

can i replace vids with b/w pics ? and this changes are stable after update ?

can i replace vids with b/w pics ? and this changes are stable after update ?

Pics should be fine, as long as you can find a way to convert them into WebM videos first. In fact, if you can make them fade into each other, it would probably look very nice.

Unless a patch changes the videos, or you verify your game cache in Steam, the changes will be stable.

Deleted them long ago, I get around 40 FPS.

Man, are you lot all running discount laptops or something? Well, my computer gets 115fps when I turn off the videos.

HardyStyled has amazing videos for his stream. You can see sthem in the beginning: https://www.twitch.tv/hardystyled/v/111590302

HardyStyled has amazing videos for his stream. You can see sthem in the beginning: https://www.twitch.tv/hardystyled/v/111590302

Oh cool. They look easy to make, but still create a great atmosphere.

Ok, here we go. I created a quick example video. The footage is far from refined and frankly a bit ridiculous, but it's mostly to show people what can be done.

Instructions:

• Go to: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzS5dG86IZd5UVJYbmlxQTRaalU/view?usp=sharing
  
  
• Download the video to your COH2 movies folder: \steamapps\common\Company of Heroes 2\CoH2\Movies
  
  
• Open the file 'flag_soviet.lua' with Notepad.
  
  
• Change the movie title to "60fps_menu_example_soviets.webm". Save and exit.
  
  
• Load up COH2 and change your army loadout to Soviets.
  
  
• Adjust the opacity and watch the Soviet hordes do their thing
  

Notes:

• The menu system still has flaws. Sometimes adjusting the opacity would make the whole thing go down to 1fps until I changed to a different menu screen.
  
  
• The video also seemed to go a bit too fast sometimes.
  
  
• Something else I've forgotten for the moment. Will come back to me shortly.
  

Pics should be fine, as long as you can find a way to convert them into WebM videos first. In fact, if you can make them fade into each other, it would probably look very nice.

Unless a patch changes the videos, or you verify your game cache in Steam, the changes will be stable.



Man, are you lot all running discount laptops or something? Well, my computer gets 115fps when I turn off the videos.

1080, i7

Does anyone know of any good HD 60fps+ COH2 videos that might make nice background videos for the COH2.org community? Close-up montages of units fighting would probably be the coolest

Maybe historical footage from HCT channel on YouTube? It works wonders for inspiring many (including myself) to play matches.

Pics should be fine, as long as you can find a way to convert them into WebM videos first. In fact, if you can make them fade into each other, it would probably look very nice.

Unless a patch changes the videos, or you verify your game cache in Steam, the changes will be stable.

i try it

1080, i7

For the sake of my curiosity, can I ask your exact CPU, video card and motherboard models? Also, how much RAM do you have?

I guess it's a compatibility issue, possibly some configurations run videos without acceleration. Maybe it's as simple as NVIDIA/AMD difference?

As for the 1fps after changing opacity problem, it is not your fault. I was able to easily reproduce this with standard, never touched videos. Normally it is running at 29-30fps so I guess I'm in the same situation as you and I could run it much more swiftly after getting the 60fps ones.

EDIT: Yep, without videos its running at 60-120fps depending on amount of button animations running.