Why are so many movies in AVI format?

[edumakation]

I have noticed that many movies found on the net are in AVI format? Why is that? Is it because it reduces file size? If I want to convert AVI movies into mpeg(or mpg, dunno the difference between the two) format using the best settings, will the quality deteriorate, and if so, by how much?

What about movies in WMV/ASF formats? Should I give up on converting those to mpeg's?

My 500Mhz celeron comp with 8MB onboard graphics don't play avi files very well unless I lower the video setting to 16million colors, so AVI files have been a long and frustrating problem for me. If converting AVI movies into mpeg's won't degrade the quality, then I'm willing to learn. Otherwise, I might as well delete them.

Any thoughts will be gratefully accepted.

"I have noticed that many movies found on the net are in AVI format? Why is that? Is it because it reduces file size"?
Correct. Have you ever noticed the size of the mpegs out there?

"What about movies in WMV/ASF formats? Should I give up on converting those to mpeg's"?

I had one at one time. It was a DEVIL in disguise. I eventually went and
found the same movie in avi DVDRip format. Much easier to work with.

"My 500Mhz celeron comp with 8MB onboard graphics don't play avi files very well unless I lower the video setting to 16million colors, so AVI files have been a long and frustrating problem for me. If converting AVI movies into mpeg's won't degrade the quality, then I'm willing to learn".

I have a 500Mhz AMD K6-2, 327meg RAM, 40 gig HD and 6.4 gig HD,
Voodoo 3 3000 16meg video card.

All of those specs play all of my movies files, no matter what size.
The video card may have something to do with it but I can't say for sure.
You don't really loose too much quality. The "Crispness" may not
be there but at least you have something to be able to burn for a DVD
player. If you are going to encode, try using TMPGEnc. Also,
make sure you have enough RAM and maybe upgrade your video card.
TMPGEnc is free but the other two may run you from $100-$150.

Since no one had posted yet I kinda felt obligated, since our machines
seem to be the bottom of the barrel here. I have only seen one other
sub-750Mhz system, and that was a 550Mhz. Everything else is at
least a gig, if not more. At some point in the future I will upgrade.
I have built my system from scratch so all I would need to upgrade
is the MB and CPU. Not too bad.

Goodluck and if you need anymore help, just ask.

[edumakation]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Megadeus324. Yeah, seems like our systems are nearly obsolete, heheh.

You know, I read through some of the threads on analog to digital converters at this board, and many of them use their own codec to to convert avi's files to mpeg and the quality doesn't seem to degrade much, from what other members have said. Would such codecs enable me to have good avi to mpeg conversion even though I do not own the hardware? Hmmm, I think I'll read some more.

[secretagent]

it is easy to convert wmv and asf files. go to http://www.stoik.com and go to downloads page and download freeware video convertor. also most of the time you can just load asf into tmpeg and it will handle it.

[edumakation]

Thanks, Secretagent!

I better learn to convert avi files into mpeg properly. There're too many good avi movies out there to give up on.

[sterno]

AVI files can use a number of different types of compression (including none). Most of the longer AVI files you'll find out there are encoded using some type of DivX/MPEG4 variant, and playing those is very CPU-intensive. It doesn't help that you have a Celeron, which is crippled to begin with, and on-board video, which almost always uses the system memory and has to compete with everything else for access to the system bus.