{"id":363,"date":"2003-08-19T16:06:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-19T16:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/08\/363\/"},"modified":"2003-08-19T16:06:00","modified_gmt":"2003-08-19T16:06:00","slug":"363","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/08\/363\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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  &#8211; a pile of movies with titles like <i>Fellowship of the RIng<\/i>, <i>The Two Towers<\/i>, <i>What Dreams May Come<\/i>, <i>The Animatrix<\/i>, <i>Fight Club<\/i> and <i>Citizen Kane<\/i>. And the LotR movies were 2-cd rips ,so the quality was awesome.<\/p>\n<p>Slight Hitch: <i>Animatrix<\/i> and <i>The Two Towers<\/i> didn&#8217;t play. Windows Media Player, helpful as usual, said &#8220;Unable to download appropriate decomressor&#8221;. 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 <i>see<\/i> the Animatrix, not just hear it&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; <\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><i>The file contains the following type of data:<br \/>\n                              Video Data: FOURCC code &#8220;XVID&#8221;<br \/>\n  You may need to install a new video codec on your computer to watch this video.<\/i><\/div>\n<p>Hmm.<br \/>\nIt was 10 in the night when I discovered this. Got dressed, took up Mons&#8217; bunch of floppies, and went over to the office. Discovered that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xvid.org\/\">XVID<\/a> was a different codec altogether, and you indeed need new <a href=\"http:\/\/nic.dnsalias.com\/XviD-Dec.exe\">codecs<\/a> to run XVid movies. Made backup copies in 3 different floppies. (Grrr! Floppies are a menace to free society ) and headed home.<\/p>\n<p>11 when I got back. Suddenly remembered that my computer does not have a floppy drive. ( see above &#8220;Grr&#8221; statement for reasons), and also remembered that I <i>had<\/i> the drive from my old system lying around somewhere. <i>Provided it worked.<\/i> Half an hour of hasty cable-work ( where do all the screws go when you need them? why is it <i>so<\/i> hot when you are trying to fix something? Why do I <i>always<\/i> 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 &#8230;..er&#8230;.watched the screen with jaws open as the opening action sequence of <i>The Final Flight of The Osiris<\/i> played. <\/p>\n<p>Whooof. Me and my &#8220;urges&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; a pile of movies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}