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On 26/09/11 19:23, paul sutton wrote:
On 26/09/11 19:16, Rob Beard wrote:On 26/09/11 18:19, paul sutton wrote:HI having just copied a few episodes of "star trek new voyages" to a dvd, I tried to have a go at playing back the video (avi) windows media player opens and decides by some weird logic to play it as an audio file complete with the effects, giving up i switched over to Linux and played the file on the portable hdd, through movie player and it works. Upon loading in to media player on Windows it seemed to suggest it was going to download the required files to play it, lol anyway season 4 episodes 1,2, and 4 - 6 (i am working on ep 3) are now on dvd. :) Why is it windows does stupid things. PaulIt's not doing stupid things, it just didn't have the codecs installed. Was it Windows XP by any chance?yeah, just using it to play games.I'm guessing that you're maybe running Linux Mint (which has non-free codecs pre-installed) or Ubuntu and you're running it through mplayer or you've either installed the gstreamer codecs or w32codecs from Medibuntu?UbuntuIIRC Windows XP will play WAV audio, MP3 audio, MPEG 1 video and WMV/WMA format files out of the box, and if you install a newer version of Media Player it'll also play MPEG2 video and DVD video, but if you want XVID/DIVX/MP4 format video, or OGG, FLAC etc audio then you have to install a codec. Personally I'd recommend the Combined Community Codec Pack.Just avi file.
AVI is the container (basically the file that wraps up the video and audio, and optionally subtitle content in a snuggly warm blanket). Other containers could be MKV or OGG :-)
It sounds like Windows Media player looked at the file and worked out from the stream IDs that it was maybe a DIVX or XVID format video and MP3 audio track. It could play the MP3 audio as it understands how to decode it (thanks to the codec which is included with Windows), but it sounds like it wasn't able to decode the video stream (okay it is a bit annoying that Microsoft don't make it available).
The same would happen on Linux if it didn't have the codecs installed (although on some distros it could well prompt to install the codecs if available). Not sure about Macs, I'd hazard a guess that at least newer versions of OSX would have a basic few codecs built in, possibly in iTunes.
IIRC XVID and DIVX codecs came out after Windows XP (thinking back, I'm sure the early versions of DIVX were hacks of the Windows Media codecs) and in the early days if you wanted to play DVDs you needed a DVD player application (or hardware decoder). You'll find Vista and Windows 7 have better support out of the box.Well they are newer, Windows and office are for people who have too much money and can afford it.
Not necessarily, quite a few people buy PCs with Windows pre-installed, some with Office pre-installed (although I really don't like what Microsoft were peddling, a cut down version of Office that only worked so many times), now it seems to have an ad-supported version of Office included. I always recommend LibreOffice or OpenOffice over MS Office. I do also recommend Linux but some people just aren't interested in switching, seems to be about 75% stick with Windows and 25% give Linux a try, I can convince them more if they have a really old PC, such as a friend of mine I am sorting a laptop out for (P3 700 with 384MB Ram and an 8GB hard drive).
Some people also take advantage of things like the educational discounts on Windows and (Office 2010 Pro full version for about 38 quid and Windows 7 Pro upgrade for about 39 quid).
Oh, and try playing the videos on a freshly installed Debian or Fedora system, I'm sure you'll find similar issues... http://tinyurl.com/6hj7qj9 http://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs Don't get me wrong, I'm not standing up for Windows, but I'd hardly call it a Windows fail.Ok
:-) Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq