Codec Blues

Ok Phantazmm takes a small break from work, with the partial purpose of catching up on some TV he hasn't had the time to get through.

Using Kazaa, IRC and so forth he collects well over 20 GB of "Friends" "Enterprise" "Deep Space Nine" episodes as well as a number of movies. With crisps, nuts, donuts and milk shakes at the ready he settles down in from of the entertainment system that has his PC at its heart and fires up some stuff.....

Most of the movies are fine, being encoded with Divx for video and mp3 for audio.

But when he comes to lots of the series episodes, there is a problem:

Often, the video stream has been encoded with Divx, but the audio stream is some other, unknown codec.

When he tries to play it, Windows Media Player cries out about contacting a codec server, and even goes through the pretense of downloading the appropriate codec.....

Which of course does not work.

This is made even more frustrating because when Phantazmm examines what the .avi reckons its audio codec was, its labelled "Windows Media Audio V2"....

Now, one would expect that to play in Windows Media Player under XP with pretty much no problems... eh??? Well you would be surprised.

So does this spoil Phantazmm's holiday when he can't find out if Rachel has that baby in the final ep of friends season 8 or whether the Dominion win in Deep Space Nine??

Of course not!

He has the fortune to find the "Nimo Codec Pack" (http://nimo.everwicked.com/ ) which offers nearly all of the video and audio codecs a chappie will ever need!

He did uninstall Divx and its Player bits and bobs first. Nimo adds it again, but Phantazmm redownloaded the latest version and reinstalled afterward.....

He is now very happy to be able to report that indeed the Dominion are given a kicking at the end of Deep Space Nine....

http://nimo.everwicked.com/

I had such a problem with the Red Dwards episodes. Papa directed me to that pack, I didn't know about it before that.:grinthumb

Yeah what's wrong with encoding with divx5 as the video codec and mp3 as the audio? Why do people have to use these obscure codecs that no one has ever heard of??

Anyone else find that

a) you need sometimes to have the original divx3 on your system as well as the latest version of divx5 to play some files, and

b) sometimes something only plays in Divx Player and not with media player???

I've had the first case happen pretty often. Aren't different version of the DivX codec included in the Nemo pack ?

BTW I never used the player that comes with DivX. It's either WMP or Zoom player for me ( http://www.inmatrix.com/ ).

Of course I am not saying that. If you read properly you will see that that is NOT what I am saying. I am shocked that you thought that I did. Get a hold of yourself, my man. You think I don't know how popular Divx and mp3 are??? Where do you think I am living, a cave?!?!?!!?!?!!? The Moon?!?!

Now I will admit that perhaps (in light of international, english-as-a-second-language-membership in the forums), I could have phrased that sentence a little better.

I would have explained myself better by saying:

If you read even my original sentence properly though, its hard to misunderstand I think in the manner you claim you have.

I would have thought you would have worked that out, though. You think I am so dumb that I think that Divx and mp3 are obscure...??? You think I know so truly little about computing that I don't think that Divx and mp3 are popular???

And I didn't exactly say that either. You are kind of putting words in my mouth. I know fine that Vorbis Ogg, etc is not obscure and bizarre. However there are several other odd codecs floating around out there which only make life difficult for peer to peer file sharing users when people encode popular media with them. Codecs which, even if you try something like Nimo's codec bundle, are still too hard to find...

(I am suggesting also that there perhaps be a more efficient and better managed system of codec use, doing for media encoding what technologies like OpenGL and DirectX did for other media areas..... I would suggest that DivX and mp3 might be key technologies in the development of something like this.)

Whether it was that you misread my post or that I failed to explain myself properly I do not know. Probably its that I failed to explain myself properly.

Anyway my point if I can make myself understood in any shape or form is that I think that the current system of codec management is very lacking.

That "download and install on demand" feature of Windows Media Player is a mess.

Its one thing getting a codec pack put together by some helpful person but I think what is needed is something more simplier, such like what plug and play did for hardware detection / drive management, etc....

I'd either like some better system of keeping a good codec library in stock and keeping them all up to date, or I would like one asskicking video and audio codec to predominate. At the moment Divx and mp3 are popular but not entirely universal. These still have a long way to go before they combine the kind of compression that get with a really superior sounded and looking quality, so its not quite the time for that yet.