Videos, Avis, Codecs, Etc.

[ErikW]

I recently discovered the joys of BitTorrent as a way to watch Deadwood, Weeds, Entourage, Robot Chicken, etc. However, I also discovered the horrors of "that is not a file that QuickTime understands."

I've got the DivX codec in my QuickTime library, plus DivX Player, DivX Converter, DivX Doctor II, mplayer, and VLC. Nothing works on most of these AVI files. A few of them work just fine.

The trouble is, I have no way of knowing exactly what the files are (e.g. video and audio encoding formats), and therefore, what I might need to view the videos.

Should I just fire up Virtual PC?

[Skywalker]

Erik,

have you tried XviD codec as well?

[ErikW]

Yes I have it, too.

[ipscbob]

Consider that alot of these files are not what they are advertised to be. I gave up on distributed fileshare schemes a long time ago because of similiar issues. I found that some large part of the time the files I downloaded were bogus. Also consider that what you are downloading has copywrite issues.

[George]

Here is some info on why and what else to try:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/avidivx.html

mpeg and wmv are what you should zero in on when you look for likely download candidates as avi is not always Mac compatable.

Firing up VPC to watch video would be a fast way to go really, really slow because it doesn't have the horsepower to run video on the graphics bus ;-)

[mcoliver]

I would have recommended GSpot to check the avi codec you'd need. But I don't think it's available for the mac.