If I understand correctly, if I want to make a custom movie for Sims to watch on their TV set, I place the appropriate AVI files in \Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 FreeTime\TSData\Res\Movies\Broadcast, or at least that's what I've read here.

What I also (think I) understand is that each movie has a category (eg Action, Childrenmovie, comedy, etc.). Is it possible to create a new category of movies for my own custom vids, much like creating a new channel for broadcast?

Several-months-later bump.
As said before, I'm putting these files in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 FreeTime\TSData\Res\Movies\Broadcast\, each with their own folder. Tried both .avi and .movie extensions, neither of which make the movies show up anywhere.

I can only assume I'm doing something stupid. Any help?

I don't know about the movie channels but for the TV channels, as well as create a channel folder and make available movie files within the Broadcast folder itself, you also need to alter the Broadcast.ini file to tell the game to look for that folder (that file is in Config). I can't tell you what to do with that but it has been done and you should find the information somewhere on the web - look for a custom TV channel that someone has made and the documentation that should go with it. Now I think about it, I'm pretty sure the movie channels are just the same as the TV channels.

As for movies not showing up, I think there might be two problems. First of all, I think the file format needs to be MP3 (not sure but you could check). The other issue is that the game will not play over large files (this is also true for the music). The movies you are trying to get it to play might just be too big (filesize-wise, I mean). You should be seeing any movie file you put in one of the regular folders (you could test this). If you are not, there will be a problem with the file itself not the game.

Last edited by maxon : 8th Jan 2012 at 12:06 PM. Reason: for clarity

I thought we just drop our TV avi files into the Documents/ EA Games/ folder for TVs Broadcast. I don't think I ever placed any tv program I made into the actual program files.

Yes, good point, I missed she said that she was looking at the programme files.