Unitech - RPDan is probably correct. What I propose is a simpler way (possibly) to effectively do the same thing as RPDan's suggestion.
In short - both of our theories are the same - implementation is much different - that's all.
Basically you are saying you want a movie to play while DarkGDK loads your media right? (Iron Infantry is looking like its going to have a long load time also!) Well this is a great idea but take note: Movie players GENERALLY require a decent amount of CPU (Not MAJOR but...) cycles as they play. Loading Media (in my experience) is definately a CPU hog - at least DarkGDK and DBPro don't share clock cycles with other applications readily (via sleep command or anything to my knowledge). This means that to get the best results - you need to devise a way to make it so that your computer is definately executing these processes in tandem/parallel. Hardware sharing (one disk drive - two processes) is a bottle neck kind of - plus hardware is just slow. Memory - not a big deal. Need dual core/dual processors or better still a quadcore to have the best chances of it working smoothly.
Something tells me if a game engine as slick as Far Cry didn't bother - and I haven't seen any actually pull it off yet - its probably not easy to do smoothly without video glitches, stutters, pauses etc.
My idea of a loader is that you can make an EXE that has one purpose in life - starting your game as an external child process (Execute - no wait... or basically shell out and start that game so it begins loading) and the loader would then load and start to "play" the movie... constantly polling if the media was done. You would need to devise a way for your game to tell the loader its ready. Alternatively - your loader could load the game and a separate process that plays the movie - this is your project - so you'll have to trudge thorugh various ideas and see what works best - you know the drill - but the idea has merit.
RPDan's methods might make it easier to force the parallel processing you'll need - (I don't think you can choose a processor to "shell out" and launch an external program - probably can - but I don't know for certain but I DO know you should be able to select which processor you want your threads to run on. Typically this is done by via "Processor Affinity". In short you check which CPU is the most free (idle) than launch your thread there. There is no guarantee it will stay as "idle" or "free" as it was by the time your thread starts - but this is typically how its done.
Ta ta for now - and good luck. I don't envy you on this one. Me - I'm going for the splash screen - maybe a few level screen shots and the tried and true loading progress bar - you know - the kind that fills more than halfway in a few seconds - then seems to hang for a long time to get that last bit of the bar filled in? Yeah - one of those
