James Trotter wrote:
What is it, really, that causes the movies to play so slowly?
AFAIK, all Blizzard games use Bink. In WoW the speed of video playback I've noticed is very dependent on audio performance. When the ALSA driver improved, the cinematics got noticeably less choppier for me (can't remember when that happened, back around 0.9.0). They're still not as smooth as they should be now though so I'm not sure.
http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm
Someone more curious about speeding things up can download the standalone windows bink player from there and put the war3/d2 cinematics through it (you may need to extract them from an MPQ first, google for mpq extractors). This way you could know if the video performance is due to something specific to the games.