codecs

[bigmac]

can someone help me please,been down loading now for some time and most of the films i download run ok . ive got divx pro package installed .but every now and then a film tys to access the net to download a codec to run the film if i dont let it then it wont play. and if i do then it will. my question is how come i have to download the codec every time? and can i save the codec so that idont have to do this and also where do i get the codec from?. i know you must think that i am a right geek but got to learn somewhere and ive been told this is the best place on the www.

[JazzMC]

The best solution to your problem is to get abc AVI Tag Editor 1.6, open the file(s) with that, given that they are avi files, else you only need a software DVD player, as that one should be able to play all mpeg1 and mpeg2 variants and filetypes .

That program will tell you what codec(s) you need for the file, and then you just get those and install them for good .

DO NOT USE CODEC PACKS ! Use single installer files .

Jan .

[bugster]

When WMP is given an AVI that it can't find the codec for on the local system, it will try and download the appropriate codec from the Microsoft website. If it can't find the codec, or you don't let it download, then the file will not play as you have seen. The reason for this is that there are many different codecs in use, especialliy, or so it seems, variants of MS own codecs. If you want to watch the movie you have downloaded, or encode it to another format, you must have the right codec. Let it download and install what it wants and you will be able to view the avi.

What you need to realize is that avi is just a wrapper format (Audio Video Interleave). The audio and video within one of these files can be encoded/compressed by many different programs. One of the pieces of info in the avi header is a tag (one each for audio and video) that tells a player what codec is needed to decompress and play the content of the file.

Hope this helps

[Dragonsf]

You can look up the FOURCC (the 4 chars following the tag) in the registry under:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32]
"wave"="mmdrv.dll"
"vidc.msvc"="msvidc32.dll"
"vidc.cvid"="iccvid.dll"
"vidc.mrle"="msrle32.dll"
"vidc.iv31"="ir32_32.dll"
"vidc.iv32"="ir32_32.dll"

the FOURCC are the ones after vidc.