Okay. I've scoured the internet, looked over my personal Sims 3 install, and even contacted EA Customer Support on this issue (They were very good at answering my questions in the past), but I am stumped.

I have yet to find anything similar to a Broadcast.ini file in my Sims 3 directory, so now I am asking all of you if Maxis left in what I thought to be one of the coolest features in Sims 2: Custom Television Channels.

I am aware that doing this in Sims 2 required use of SimPE, so I guess what I am asking is this: has anyone figured out how to put custom TV channels into Sims 3, or did I compile the title sequences of my favorite childhood cartoons for naught?

If it is not possible now, I am sure it will be soon, once the modding community at large has had more time to develop tools (It has been less than a month, and I am amazed at what we already have available. Seriously, my proverbial hat is off). I just thought I'd start this thread to track any information on whether this cool hack/feature from the previous Sims installment would make it to its latest incarnation.

Anyone made any progress on this? I'd love to add some music videoclips to my sims' TVs. It'd make my couch-potato sims so much easier to take.

After looking into this I can see that the tv video files are in fullbuild 01
they are labelled as .video
I tried renaming an extracted one to .avi but not that easy. Theoretically if we can figure out conversion we can replace the default vids.
I'll keep looking into it.

Thanks, wintermuteai1. Good to know that I'm not the only one hoping to give my Sims something new to watch. I made a compilation video of the opening title sequences of all my favorite classic NickToons (Nicktoons Network) with the video requirements of Sims 2. I can only hope that my Sims will be able to unwind after a long day at work with a classic episode of "Invader Zim", "Angry Beavers" or "Rocco's Modern Life".

I thought you could do this by default? I coulda sworn I remember reading that you could place your own videos in a folder in my documents like you do with the music and it would work? But it doesn't seem that simple.

THere's some info about this here: http://www.simlogical.com/Sims3Tool...php?topic=234.0

I accidentally stumbled upon a resource in the GameplayData package simply called TV. It contained data all about the TV channels - their name, the video files they use, the traits they pertain to, etc. I successfully added a new channel, but copied and pasted the video files from another channel until we can figure out how to add our own.

You did this via XML tuning right? I thought the game crashed when extra lines were added to the XML files?

I am pretty sure the game doesn't crash when you add extra lines lol. The amount of extra lines I've added to things hasn't made my game crash!

I managed to convert the .video files to .avi. Now We need to use xalwaysvindicatedx cloned channel and throw in the video files. I think we could probably import them in a package into fullbuild1, but you might want to run that by a higher-up before doing it. Oh and xalwaysvindicatedx, you can use the STBL editor to re-name that channel to something else.

Here's the download to the .avi file for one of the channels: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=...04e75f6e8ebb871

Wow! I'm glad to see we've made so much progress on this! I don't know why my e-mail notification didn't work! Nice work, guys!

Same with me, not sure why I didn't get any notifications for this thread.

@Jadaytime
What did you use to convert the VIDEO files to AVI?

I use Tunebite pro to convert wmv, mov, flv, mp4 to avi.

This is a .video file. It's a little more complicated, I will write a full tutorial if I can successfully import the video file and get the game to read it.

I believe that I've found something (from another forum post, I think...) that might interest you all:



At SimLogical, it says:

By klanly,

* Normal
*
* Posts: 49

Re: Sims 3 TV Video Files?
« Reply #2 on: Jul 01, 02:52 »

I have wrote something about this a month ago..(oh if you know Chinese)
http://game.ali213.net/thread-2730539-1-1.html

1. export type 0xb1cc1af6 from FullBuild1.package
2. rename the *.bnry (.video) to *.vp6
3. drag the *.vp6 to eaconv.exe (you can find it somewhere using Google) (attached)
4. it generates *.avi files, just play it with MPC Homecinema.



Hope that helps. (It helped me, but too bad that MPC Homecinema wouldn't download) (they still run in Windows Media Player, however...)

PS: I attached EA Converter just to make it easier!

Yeah that's what I used. I haven't managed to convert them back to .video yet. I first want to make sure it's possible to add a new video to a channel first.

Okay, so this is how I understand it, but I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me where necessary:

We just need a way to convert the .avi files into .video so we can package them into the game? Getting the .videos to .avi is not something that the average user will need to do, we just need to know the specifications of each movie when we make our own .avi, like the dimensions and FPS rate.

Essentially, all we need to do is find a way to do what the EA Video converter does, but do it backwards. In other words, take our own .AVI made to match the specs of the game's movies, and turn them into .videos, which we can then package into the game.

Is that about the size of it?

From what I understand, that's pretty much all we need to get this working.

That's exactly it. Sorry to lie, but I said in my reason for editing, I was going to put it on another thread, but you all have just explained exactly what I was going to ask you all.

Well, whenever I tried to open "eaconv.exe" (attached before) in Wordpad, this is just a "sample" of what I've got:

Someone help! I can't wait for a reverse-engineered (I hope that was the right word...) program that does the total opposite of eaconv.exe, and totally helps us out in modding! :bunny



And, also, I've extracted a few videos from the FullBuild.package (whichever one contains the videos...), and I heard that someone talked about the details of the videos (in this thread): (if you need them, here they are, from the ones that I've extracted

Basic Videos - 15 fps - 256x256 ( there's a bunch of blackness around it)
Opening Videos - 29 fps - 1300 (approximately) x 600 (approximately) (Windows won't show them to me anymore, even though I used Prism to convert them back) (And, yes, I did use Prism to convert it to .mov, since I didn't buy Prism MPEG Edition (costed 29.99 approximately, and I didn't want to waste my money, and yes, it was a sale at register.exe)...)

I just did those specifications from memory... I hope this is what you've been looking for... :P

The 256x256 is right, I don't know about anything else however. I made a blank .video file and tried to import it into a package file. I succeeded with this but I couldn't get the game to read it.

Hmmm, I see that no one can manage to get any file into the game as a .video file without the game breaking down, huh? Does anyone know who creates EA Converter? Does anyone here know that person's E-Mail?

If they do, ane E-Mail him/her about the program's code and reversing it, maybe that would work? Cause if that works, we could have the code reversed , then, well, we could get those AVI's into .VIDEO's!

The video file's size (256x256) is correct, but did anyone notice all the black space around it (I might be seeing things because I was using Adobe Premiere Elements, and you all know the widescreen that it gives EVERY (:! video in which is it given (placed:!... Wierd...)...

Maybe Google has something about this? (it always gives me OFF-TOPIC search result answers! :google: )

Last night (or a few nights ago,) I gave EA Converter a VIDEO file, not a VP6 file, unlike the forum that I read (on SimLogical) about it, and, the video still ran (in Windows Media Player)! (Wierd, I know...)

Hi,
Sorry for my so poor english, I hope you'll understand me :/

I could partially insert a personnal video into the Sims, replacing and existing one.
I have video but no audio, I didn't find the correct codec (I didn't look for a long time).

First of all, you don't need to reverse your .avi in a special .video !
I used only virtualDub to convert a video into vp6 codec.
I used VP60 Simple Profile, one pass - Best Quality, Auto Keyframe, CBR. I also did a "Convert to 15fps" and a 256x256 resize. I disabled audio.

I renamed the new-vp6.avi in the S3_xxxxxx.video I wanted to replace, inserted it in a new package, putted it in my mod folder and that's all.


For audio, I quickly tried PCM and MP3 without succes. Video couldn't be read or the game crashed.

Alright, here's a quick guide to adding a channel. Since invidicated was able to do it, I found out how.

Open up the LATEST version of S3PE.
Open up the GameplayData.package
Arrange by name and look for TV.
Import this file into a new .package file of your choice.
Get to the editing screen and look for this code (should be at the top. Seems EA made it easy for us on making our own channel!)



Basically, you just copy and paste this and add this AFTER the VERY LAST TV Channel, or you could try anywhere in between the <TVChannel>'s coding. Don't forget to give it a name as well. You really should place it at the bottom so nothing conflicts. Here's my example.



Note: I'm not sure what happens if you don't set the Channel_Level as Level1, but it's like that for every channel, so do it. I'm not sure what happens, unless someone is willing to take a chance and break their game, so just set it as Level1.


I think I got everything. Is this correct? Did not get to test it out yet. Just my theory on how you did it.

In order to get your channel to say what you want it to, use the STBL Editor. Not too sure though, just putting in what jadaytime said.

How would you change the channel name? I searched TV in the STBL editor, but found nothing...

Now I can put Computer videos on TV! At least, I can simply open S3PE and look at all those names... This is gonna be great, at least, for later... First:

• Does anyone know the creator?
• Does anyone have a program that converts .avi or .vp6 into .video (Does the opposite of EA Video Converter(EAconv.rar)...)? (I bet not...)
• Does anyone have the differences between the headers of the .avis and the .video's beginning text (of the coding of the file, it's the first line of text, to the nonsensible coding I have shown you all above..., I mean, I am not coding aprogram or anything! That's just too plain confusing ...)

Once that happens, and a sucessful replacement video goes into the game, then we can attempt to make our own TV channels, thanks to Odistant... Then "Replacement Mods" can be made!

And new channels! But for now, I'm going to attempt to make my own channels for SIMS 3!

Making channels is easy, but adding new video files is hard. I made a blank .video file and imported it into s3pe. I gave it the right type and a random instance. S3PE recognized it as a video file but I couldn't get the game to recognize it. I think you would have to mess around in the DLL's if you want to get the .video file's instance assigned with a set of words. I haven't tried it yet, but presumably replacement works =P.

Another thing, I made a new channel (Sci-Fi Station) and made the associated traits Computer Whiz, and genuis, and a sim with one, or two of these traits will have their fun meter filled up faster.

One more thing, the Synced event will randomly trigger an animation. "The Big Play" for example is what your sim does sometimes when they are watching the sports channel.