Widescreen Cutscenes

These are upscaled cutscenes appropriate for playing the game on a widescreen monitor.

Installation:

Extract the archives inside the movies folder where your game is located.

You can download part 1 and start playing immediately, and by the time you finish chapter 1, chances are part 2 will have finished downloading (provided you remember to start the download before jumping in the game 😁).

Why does this exist:

This game has many, many pre-rendered cutscenes. As an old game from the original XBox era, these videos are all low resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio. On a modern display the game stretches the videos, to fit the display resolution, distorting the aspect ratio, plus the low-res videos look awful stretched out.

There are already 2 other mods on nexusmods that replace the cutscenes, however both have problems:

Ausanan1's Jade Empire Remastered stretches the video files to a 16:9 aspect ratio, leading to distortion.

DarthSieger's Upscaled FMVs are a better quality upscale, but merely add vertical black bars on the side of the video files, preventing them from getting distorted, rather than cropping the horizontal black bars already present.

This mod takes DarthSieger's upscales and crops them to a widescreen (16:9) resolution.

The resolution of the included videos is 1440x810. The game will then stretch those to your display resolution (for example 2560x1440). It's not exactly native quality, but they will look much better than the old low-res videos (which were 800x400 in most cases).

To the point they take up most of the disk space occupied by the game. Even before upscaling, the game itself is 2. 6 GB, while the cutscenes alone are 4. 2 GB.

Known issues:

The subtitles appear too fast. Likely a result of the increased video framerate.

Tools used:

Handbrake - to crop DarthSieger's videos.

RAD Video Tools - to convert back to .bik video format the game uses.