Hack 81. Customize the Halo 2 Demo Videos

Use this hack to play your own videos as the Halo 2 demo.

Altering the Halo 2 splash screen is cool, but adding your own demos to the game is even better. Creating a custom Halo 2 video involves replacing the files in the bink directory. In this example, I will replace the video used in Halo 2's attract mode.

To work with the BIK file format, you can use an application developed by Rad Game Tools. To download the program, visit http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm.

First, record your personal demo using your own capture technique. Once you have the video, open it in the RAD Video Tools program and click Bink It!. This will create a .BIK file based on your video (see Figure 10-13).

Figure 10-13. Converting the AVI video to Bink format

Once you have the file converted, simply change the name to attract_60.bik and transfer [Hack #54] it to the Halo 2/bink directory on your Xbox (see Figure 10-14).

After you transfer the Bink video to your Xbox, you just need to wait for the demo reel to run (see Figure 10-15).

Figure 10-14. FTP your custom demo to your Xbox

Figure 10-15. A custom Halo 2 demo

If you want to add your own sound to your demo, you will need to do some extra work. First, highlight the file, and click Mix in sound. Next, add a hyphen (-) to the top box. This will erase the current sound from the file. You can insert your own sound by replacing the hyphen with the sound file you want to insert. Now select the file and click Play. This will play the new demo with your personalized music.