CGDI decompressor needed - Codec used in Microsoft Camcorder

[postul8or]

I have some .avi files that I have made using Microsoft Camcorder. To view them reliably on machines you need to create a self-contained .exe file. When you use the .exe file it always gives a prompt to "run/download" the file and provides a warning about certificate (I am using this in an HTML based help file system).

What I want to do is get this codec and use virtualdub to convert it to a plain old MPEG or something that is pretty universally playable by windows media players.

Can anyone suggest how I get this codec installed so that virtualdub can "see" it and use it.

Right now when I try to open the .avi file made by Microsoft Camcorder in Virtualdub I get this error "Couldn't locate decompressor for format 'CGDI' (unknown). Virtualdub requires a Video for Windows (VFW) compatible codec to decompress video. DirectShow codecs, such as those used by Windows Media Player, are not suitable."

Help would be appreciated. Even if you can tell me for a fact that it is not possible to do what I want...hearing the honest words would help!

Also, recommendations of other free software screen capture utilities that create screenshots of reasonable size would be welcome.

[BJ_M]

yea that one is a odd one .. MS is not help on specs ..

info i found on it http://www.atug.com/toolbookmag/OUTPUT/TOCONV22.htm

it is from 1996 and the application doesnt even work on any version of nt ..

i think all you can do is screen capture it ..

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q160937
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/office/content/office97/camcorder.asp

[BJ_M]

http://www.webattack.com/Freeware/gmm/fwscreen.shtml

freeware video capture apps .. they say freeware but im not sure , havnt used any of them and as always watch for spyware crap.

[postul8or]

That's funny, when I was searching around on the net I ran into the ATUG page as well. I also have found a few articles on the MSDN site, but none of them obviously steered me in the direction of being able to rip off their codec so I could promptly convert it to a good non-Microsoft codec

In the freeware link that you gave me there appears to be one program that shows good promise called CamStudio. I'll check it out, see if it can do what I want and if it freeware, spyware or shareware that they have called freeware.

Thanks for the help. If anyone else has a way of getting the CGDI codec to work in virtualdub I'd still be up for that.

[mbellot]

postul8or,

Have you tried re-encoding to mpeg with Tmpeg?

I seem to remember it supports DirectShow codecs...

Mark

[BJ_M]

problem is - it isnt a directshow codec -- in installing active movie breaks it .. i think it was one guy in a closet at MS that built it and he/she is still locked up some where .. or as ussual MS bought some company for millions and killed thier devolopment

[postul8or]

I'll throw it at TMPEG and see what happens, I just expected there was no way it would work.

Here's the interesting thing. I was originally using this MS Camcorder program on a Windows 98 laptop that had hardly any updates attached to it. That's right, Media Player 5 I think it was! Not 6.4, not 7. The kicker is that Media Player 5 played this CGDI codec just fine! I upgraded to Media Player 7 and then it STOPPED WORKING! I uninstalled 7 and it reverted back to 6.4 (strange) and that didn't work. I then uninstalled 6.4 (thanks Microsoft for the 2 uninstalls necessary to get back to Media Player 5) to bring me back to Media Player 5 and it worked again.

Thing is the other computers in the office are NT machines all with Media Player 6.4 (or newer on newer boxes I imagine). As you can see I need something that can reliably convert this CGDI codec to MPEG so that it works on machines with slightly different setups (OS, media player version etc.). The alternative is this CamStudio program I downloaded which appears to be quite good. It lets you choose from a list of Codecs, Huffyuv wasn't on the list unfortunately. I've really got to play with a bit to see how it will work for me.

Keep the ideas coming if you've got any. Thanks guys.

[postul8or]

I downloaded the Microsoft Encoder 7.1 program and tried doing my own screen capture movies with it and was disappointed (not that I'm all that surprised). Many of the codecs were only capturing 320X240 and the ones that did capture 640X480 did not play back properly in the media player after I made them.

Another pet peeve of mine is codecs that don't even seem to use huffman/zip type compression to make the file size reasonable (just using lossless encoding). Fair enough, I figure I can just pop the .avi file into Virtualdub and convert it to a codec where I do get some intelligent compression and such. Then I get this message that as of virtualdub 1.3d the ability to work with Microsoft codecs is disabled because the pricks at Microsoft got mad that anyone would want to convert to/from one of their ingenious codecs.

I would love to encode or convert things to divx format actually, but the kicker there is that I'm not sure how legal divx is and how the techie guys at work would feel about installing the divx codecs on the machines when I install my software.

The best course of action I have determined to take is to use this old Lotus Screencam program (are you surprised, my answer is to avoid using Microsoft). This program can create the movie files and as long as I put the scplayer.exe in the same directory as the movie files everything works fine.

Multimedia was supposed to be here more than 5 years ago and I just am not finding that integrating multimedia in development is really that good with microsoft tools.

[BJ_M]

mpeg4 or QT (qt 6 is mpeg4 anyway as is divx 5 really) may be a compressed type that would be accepted as its "legal"

[postul8or]

Yeah I think that some form of the divx/MPEG4 codec is really the best size-quality choice out there. The main problem is that the codecs are not installed on just any machine and given that in this case I'm talking about computers in the work environment I have to deal with the Computer Techs which are control freaks when it comes to installing anything.

I am sort of interested to see if I can take out the individual .dll files for the codec and somehow in my program incorporate registering them with the registry. This way I can just include all the files in one install package and install it without it being an obvious extra step to the IT guys.

Has anyone done this before that can give me some advice?