HELP Why can't I see avi? How do I get the codec?
 

Hi I really hope someone can help me. When I have downloaded a movie in avi I can never watch it... It always asks for the codec... But how do I get that codec? I downloaded DivX Player and DivX Movies as I read somewhere here in the forum, but it didn't help. I am looking very much forward to hear from you. Have a super weekend, ALEX!!!

2 suggestions. For codec identification get Get GSpot (click on link). For a backup player with in-built codecs get VLC - (click on link) _ (choose nearest mirror site) VLC saves you continually installing & updating your codecs. Not a pretty player but it does the job when needed. ;)

Same problem..
 

I'm having the same problem when trying to play a downloaded avi file. It will not play period (video nor audio) in windows media player or real player. I downloaded the player you suggested and it played but with no sound or video again (but this time it would actually attempt to play). So when I say play I mean the time bar moved like it does for normal movies, expect I didnt' see nor hear anything..

I run gspot and it says that this file is not a valid avi file. Does that mean that I've downloaded a bad file that just is not going to play?

I'm living overseas and dying to watch the fall premires!!

I've been wondering about codex and how I get some, too, but my downloaded movies from LW are all playing fine, but play best on my Windows Media Player. Come to think of it, my RealPlayer shows that sound is working, but I still can't hear it and can't see it at all. Could it be a resource issue? I have WinXP Home running with 256 ram and lots of free harddrive space. I've also gotten the invalid file message and the file played just fine, so go figure....

But if anyone is listening, I have some questions, too, about just what all the letters mean, like wmv, avi, srt, and mpg mean. When I talked with a friend about my avi downloads, (that's what I've been selecting) he said that he was amazed I got a picture, said the avi is the sound portion of movies or some such thing.
I've tried to look up the definitions of the movie extensions, but come up blank everytime in any help files I go to.
Another question is the time that some folks put in the info of their files to share. I always pick the biggest files in hopes of getting the full movie and it sure looks like the full movie when watched. But the info says for a 700 meg file that it's 59 minutes long. That's not long enough for a complete movies. So what am I getting? An edited version? Does the sharer cut them down, or do the programs do it for you? And how do they get squeezed from a 2 gig movie to what we can download? I have DVDShrink, but I don't know what it does really. And I haven't figured out how to use it either. The movies I shrink seem to come out as long as they were to begin with, unless they were longer than 2 gigs to begin with.
Any help on this would be wonderful. Maybe if I understood what was happening better, I could get my copies on the computer to share. So far, I think 2 gigs is too big to share. I wonder what extension they have once DVDShrink has shrunk them? Oh, help! Anyone! Thanks.

Yeah i have that problem too with...cough cough...a certain season premiere.
It's not like i'm a complete novice either so please don't think i maybe unclear about the existence of DivX codecs or the player or that i havent tried downloading VLC player as suggested.
Despite having spent an entire sunday looking for the codec required to play it, I have not been successful in finding one which has had any effect.
G-spot names the codec needed to be
'Motion JPEG including Huffman Tables' yet tells me i have codecs installed which claim to be able to procces this format.
All websites i checked gave me links only to the IBM site which didnt enable me to download it either.
Basically i have tried every player and every codec package i've been able to find. I have also tried downloading different versions of these videos but none of them seem to work. HELP!

So did you actually try using VLC to play the trouble-some file?

yes i tried using the vlc program you suggested but it was the same as using real player or divX.... 1h 49min of blank instead of 42 min of a video.
if it helps sometimes it displays something like what youd get on a very old TV with no channels.... basically stripes of different colour, if you know what i mean

Sounds like it's been encoded with a very poor or old encoder. Either way, if even VLC can't play it then if no other program plays it, I personally would trash it. Have you tried to see if your Nero or Roxio burner program can convert it?

yeah...i forget what its called... 'dub' something or another.
didnt work... gave me a 12 MB file of blankness too.
i don't get how it can be an encoding problem tho... because there was tons of different version of the same video out there, all with the same problem.
I think i've tried all the more or less common versions and if i try downloading a video with only 3 ppl sharing it, it will take me a month.
I just reckon that if it was an unreadble file why hasnt every1 else trashed it?

For the benefit of the sharing community please submit your findings at the Bitzi site How to use Bitzi Web Lookup ...

What file is this that won't play on anything? Have you downloaded other files that do work? If so, I agree you should trash this one. It's just one of those mysteries that might be solved by Einstein, but no one else. I long ago decided computers work on magic; we just think we understand how it all works. But don't mind me. I believe the same thing of the combustion engine.
I went to Google to look up the extension abbreviations and found most of them. AVI is Audio/Video Interleaved. (I haven't figured out leaves yet, though.) MOV is QuickTime content developed by Apple, but that hardly explains the m and o and v. MPEG is Moving Picture Experts Group and MPEG4 is the International Standard. WMV is Windows Media file with audio. (What's the v for then?)
I also looked up codex and got codec which is COmpression/DECompression, an algorithm that encodes or reduces the bytes for large files or programs. Is that the same as codex?
Somewhere in all that I got links to sites for downloading codexes. I made a couple into favorites, if you're interested in seeing if they are sites you haven't already tried.
I still need to know how to take a new movie DVD and download it to my computer in a shareable file form. Is this some cabalistic secret that only the FEW know and can do? I got some neat movies I'd like to share.
Is it true that you can really only download to your system movie files that several users already have on their systems? Without enough hosts, it takes forever. Using DSL with 4 hosts it took two days to download the last movie I wanted. And without multiple locations, I can't get anything but "Need more resources" now. Didn't use to be this hard to download a movies. Is there just too many of us trying now? I have 7 to 10 folks uploading from my system night and day, sharing 19 KB/s between them. That's gonna take a long time.
I had to turn off the screen saver on my system (the hibernate is already off) because everytime the screen saver came on LW would put my connection to sleep. I don't remember it doing that before, since I could download all the time. The turbo charged connection never went to sleep like it does now. I could set it to downloading and it would finish it on it's own without me having to continually wake it up.
I've blathered on again. I should change my nickname to Chatterbox Grandma.

well the file i'm talking about is the new episode of sm*llv*lle. i don't know if problems have cropped up with other files too, but it seems that if the file really is not readable than it must be done on purpose. I have finally been able to locate a version that according to bitzi lookup works.
As to what the file extensions mean it doesnt really matter... other than the fact that wmv and wma (windows media video file, windows media audiofile) aren't supported by most players, other than windows media player, but they aren't useful anyway.
AVI being interleaved, as far as I know, means that the audio and video are stored side by side not seperately. if it helps think of it as being interweaving rather than interleaving. Not that thats in any way important.
Mov is short for movie... clever huh? thats not really important either.
Anyway I have not spent much time figuring out how to copy dvds into avi format , which is probably the most compact format for quality movies. Try a program called VirtualDub,. the best way to get this is by going to http://www.divx.com/divx/create/divxpro/guides/?lang=en

this is the divx players users guide which gives you good instructions on how to convert files with virtual dub and includes a link to download it. It's not an easy program to use because it has a LOT of options. It's quite good so give it a shot, but really you need the users guide.

As for ppl downloading too slowly... maybe you should limit the number of uploads you get. you can change that in the limewire preferences somewhere.

Wow! Thanks!
I know the extensions don't mean much, but I just need to know what I'm working with. Now I can forget them.
And I like thinking of interleaving as interweaving. That explains a lot. Thank you.
And thank you for the site to get the program for avi copying. That's great. If I need a user guide for it, there must be one around somewhere. I'm terrible with written instructions because I'm slightly dyslexic. I do best when shown how to do something, which isn't possible most of the time on computers.
I really really appreciate your help on this. I think I just may get the hang of it one day. Sorry your TV show won't play. I wonder how they get TV shows into shared files. But I've got enough on my plate for now. Once I get the movies figured out, I'll go on to the next project.
Thanks again!