Original game required Indeo video decoder which is old and crappy. I do not own Steam version, but I’m assuming they are using the same build as GOG. Latest edition of System Shock 2 is required in order to use HD cutscenes. They are named the same, just overwrite them. It’s still 4 times the original resolution, so there’s that…įirst backup all the original videos and replace them with new HD videos. But if you feed it higher resolution video, it will do less of its crappy scaling… I have also done resampling test on higher resolutions, but resampling filters basically just went nuts at that point, drawing things entirely out of place because you can only interpolate image details to some extent. *Actual in-game quality may vary due to video scaling engine used by the game as well as screen size/resolution. Left image is SD quality (original video, scaled with bicubic filter), right image is HD (optimized HD version) VIDEO QUALITY COMPARISON SAMPLES (click for full size)* TV series hehe), but this is probably the closest thing we can get with current technology and certainly far better results than with Bicubic or Lanczos resampling.
It is technically impossible to obtain video quality out of thin air (except in C.S.I. Original cutscenes arrived in 640×480 and 320×240 resolutions, the new HD cutscenes are all encoded at 1280×960 (4x original resolution) with special sharpening process applied that restores certain details (mostly texts and simple visual elements). System Shock 2 High Definition Cutscenes (SS2HDC) is an attempt to bring some fidelity into aging low resolution video cutscenes of System Shock 2 game.