XNA Game, Full Screen Animation / Video Playback

Question

I have an XNA game (its a slot machine).

I have some really cool animations my artist made for me that are more or less 1600x1000 and over 50 frames.

For all of the animations so far I have been using sprite sheets. (Where all the frames are in one image file and when its rendered it chooses what part of the image to show).

The problem is that you can only load an image of a certain size. 2kx2k or 4kx4k depending on your videocard. Obviously putting each frame into one file is out of the question for this large animation.

Can you just load each image individually and display them in order? (That is what I used to do for the smaller animations anyway before I found out that isn't how you were supposed to do it)

My Questions:

What if any is a good way to play these large animations?

Is there a benefit to having a spritesheet instead of loading the frames in individually as Texture2D's?

Is there a (free) way to play fullscreen videos in XNA?

Answer 1

Apparently, XNA 3.1 "now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays." That is what you'll want to use - the sizes you're talking about are far too big for conventional animation techniques. Some sample code is here.