Bink Video
More info
- Creator
- RAD Game Tools
- Released
- 1999
- Owner
- Epic Games (since 2021)
- Type
- Video codec, middleware
- License
- Proprietary
- Website
- radgametools.com
The video codec behind nearly every game intro and cutscene for two decades, because it was built for game engines rather than television.
RAD Game Tools released Bink in 1999 as the successor to its own Smacker. The selling point was never the best quality per bit; it was predictability. The decoder is light on memory, runs on the CPU with no hardware support, and the same .bik file plays identically on PC and every console. The developer decides when frames get decoded and where they land — straight into a texture, if that's what the game needs.
Hence the RAD logo flashing past at the start of thousands of titles. Bink 2 added multithreaded decoding and higher resolutions. Epic Games bought RAD in 2021 and Bink now ships with Unreal Engine, an unusually direct path from paid middleware to standard equipment.