Creating Custom Data in Ads Tutorial, or "How to edit ads"
This guide was inspired and partly sporked from Vreki's howto.
Static Images (DDS)
The images are in DDS (Direct Draw Surface) format, which you can view and edit using the free graphic tool: The Gimp. You will need the DDS plugin for Gimp too. NVidia also publish a free Adobe Photoshop DDS plugin and a thumbnailer for Windows Explorer. The Explorer DDS thumbnailer is quite useful when dealing with multiple images.
If you want to replace the images, you should first flatten your image, make sure you are using 24-bit RGB colour, then when saving, enable "Generate Mipmaps" and use DXT1 compression only. Saving to DDS format will result in some quality loss, I recommend you save any original works (unflattened) in a more "normal" image format first, like XCF (Gimp), PSD (Photoshop) or PNG (if you don’t have any layers) so that a high quality original is kept. This program has very limited checking of the files, it will not attempt to correct you if the image has the wrong dimensions. It will, however, attempt to correct you if the filesize is wrong, as this will catch the most common import problems.
Video Ads (BINK/BIK)
Video ads are in Bink Video format. I don’t know if all games support them, but I know that Trackmania Nations does, and BF2142 is likely to.
To create BINK advertisements, you should have an existing video file, in the correct size (eg: 256x128).
The next step is to transcode it to BINK/BIK format. Download the free "RAD video tools" package and install it. Run the software, and you will get a file list. Select the AVI or MOV file you wish to transcode, and click "Bink It!".
Select the location where you wish to save the video, and select transcoding options. If the video is not, for example, 256x128, use the crop and scale functions to correct the size.
For example, for a video sized 480x360, to size it to 256x128, as the aspect ratio is wider (2.0:1) on the destination than the source (1.33:1), you will need to first scale it to 256x((256/480)*360) pixels (256x192), then crop it starting from 0x((192-128)/2) (0x32), with a size of 256x128. This will, of course, chop the top and bottom of the image of the video.
The result is a BINK video you can insert. First check that the "Video Ad" option is enabled for the ad you’re replacing, and then import it. Remember to change the file type filter to allow you to import it.
If you want to view BINK video ads from your cache, export it, and you can just double click to open it if you have the RAD Video Tools installed.