Well, Anil is in studying in IIM-Kolkata now, and he messaged me last week saying that there is a pile of DivX movies on his network, and would I like some of them written on cds, so that he could pass them on during the Landmark quiz. Thus it came – a pile of movies with titles like Fellowship of the RIng, The Two Towers, What Dreams May Come, The Animatrix, Fight Club and Citizen Kane. And the LotR movies were 2-cd rips ,so the quality was awesome.
Slight Hitch: Animatrix and The Two Towers didn’t play. Windows Media Player, helpful as usual, said “Unable to download appropriate decomressor”. This, inspite of having the latest DivX Pro bundle (version 5.0.5). The Playa just hung. No message, nothing. And I lay frustrated, because Anil had not gone back to IIM yet, and so I could not find out which codec he had used to see it. I desperately wanted to see the Animatrix, not just hear it….
So last night, after a lot of soul-searching, I decided to be done with it. All or nothing. Installed VirtualDub, in order to re-encode the movie if needed. Tchah! Even VirtualDub failed to open the movie, but it gave one helpful message. This is what it said –
Video Data: FOURCC code “XVID”
You may need to install a new video codec on your computer to watch this video.
Hmm.
It was 10 in the night when I discovered this. Got dressed, took up Mons’ bunch of floppies, and went over to the office. Discovered that XVID was a different codec altogether, and you indeed need new codecs to run XVid movies. Made backup copies in 3 different floppies. (Grrr! Floppies are a menace to free society ) and headed home.
11 when I got back. Suddenly remembered that my computer does not have a floppy drive. ( see above “Grr” statement for reasons), and also remembered that I had the drive from my old system lying around somewhere. Provided it worked. Half an hour of hasty cable-work ( where do all the screws go when you need them? why is it so hot when you are trying to fix something? Why do I always forget to wear chappals before touching the CPU? ) and two botched reboots later, it was done. I lay back in my comfortable armchair, Maggi bowl in hand ( no dinner until then) and …..er….watched the screen with jaws open as the opening action sequence of The Final Flight of The Osiris played.
Whooof. Me and my “urges”.
You might want to check out this site.
Hey! This was the site that gave me the two links above. Brilliant site, really…loads of info and even a codec comparison matirix.
Speaking of cool (dvd/divx) sites… here’s a region killer site that may be useful
Hehe. I tried going to this site that day. could not access it from my office. :-)
codec
Hey, gspot, available here is a good tool.
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/ is a site worth visiting.
Re: codec
Yeah, a trip to the divx.com forums helped a lot. almost all solutions to newbie problems seemed to be diagnostics with gspot.
haven’t checked out dvdrhelp.com. Thanks for the link.