Problems playing DivX movie from a CD

[newbie05]

Ok, so what I want to do is stick in a CD that has a DivX movie on it, and have the player (which is also on the CD) start up and begin playing the movie.

I followed one of the guides here that show how to convert a DVD to DivX using the 5.1 codecs. When I play that movie from my HD, it looks great. The CPU is running a little high, @ 95%, but thats because I only have a 1.6GHz P4. I also have a Samsung DVD combo drive, that I think is rated 8X for reading DVDs and 32X for reading Cds. The drive is using DMA, and I think it has at least a 1MB cache. Now for the questions:

1) When I play the movie off the CD, it looks horrible. It's very jerky, and the weird thing is the CPU is only running @ 25%. It's hard for me to believe that it can't read the movie off the CD fast enough, considering that the DivX movie is so highly compressed and I can play DVDs off the drive with no problem. Is there some setting in the player or elsewhere that will enable me to play the movie directly off the CD??

2) I have the autorun working in that it starts the player when I insert the CD, but is there a way to pass in the movie file to the player so that it will also play the movie automatically (maybe some switch on the command line that starts the player)??

I realize that I could always copy the movie off the CD and play it, but I really don't want to do that if possible. If the consensus is just that, then is there a way to run a batch file using autorun?? I would have it copy the movie to c:\temp (or wherever the TEMP environment variable is set to), start the player off the CD and point it to the just copied movie, then delete the movie when the player is closed. Does that sound doable??

TIA,
Newbie05

[Poppa_Meth]

have you tried playing it with Media Player instead of the DivX player. I find the DivX player has problems on various systems.

[newbie05]

have you tried playing it with Media Player instead of the DivX player. I find the DivX player has problems on various systems.

Media Player did not work at all, no video is displayed. However, RealPlayer did work, and doesn't seem to care that the movie is on CD. But I don't like the idea of putting the fairly complex RealPlayer on the CD, as it's about 12x as big as the DivX player.

My thought was to include on the CD what was necessary to play the movie, so that no matter how long I keep the CD, it will always be playable. Perhaps I'm being too paranoid; should I just assume that the software I need to play the movie will always be out there somewhere, and forget about including it on every CD??

[Poppa_Meth]

just download the DivX Light program from the codec section in the tools section of the site. it installs just the DivX 5.1.1 codec and no player. once the codec is installed most media players should play it. I have no problem with Windows Media Player myself. it actually works far better than the DivX player for me most of the time. Its kind of odd though if media player won't play it. try downloading GSpot and open the media file with that. click render near the bottom and it'll tell you if you have everything you need to play the file installed correctly. I was having problems with audio on my work PC and realized I didn't have AC3 Filter installed and then it worked fine. that particular file won't even play in the DivX player at all, but plays in all other players fine.

[aguillon]

Just a note on this autoplay issue. If you are running Windows XP, you enable autoplay on the drive, then when you load a DIVX CD Windows XP will action which action to perform for CDs containing video files, choose the 'Play the file' option and anytime you load a CD containing an AVI, windows will use the default player

[bottle-necked]

Create a notepad plain text file and name it:

autorun.inf

in this file create the following lines:

[autorun]
open=DivX Player.exe mymovie.avi

Create the CD with the autorun.inf file, mymovie.avi, and DivX Player.exe, and Close the disk. Open CD projects won't always autorun.

You will need the DivX codec installed on the playing system, and AC3Filter if the movie has ac3 audio.

I don't recommend playing movies from CDs. First is the issue you're having with playback and then the issue of how hard it is on your drive. It's far better to copy the movie to HDD first and play it from there.

Good luck.