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Problem trying to watch a film in .avi format.

O

*old-guy*

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 22, 2007
161
0
Blackburn in North West England
Hi guys,
As the title says, I'm having problems trying to watch some movies in .avi file format. They are on a USB pen drive. I have VLC which doesn't want to play them at all. All I get it the small VLC panel. Real Player doesn't want to know either. Quick Time will play them after I did a DivX plug-in thing but I get about 10 seconds of video and sound followed by a frozen image with the sound carrying on. Then the image catches up for another few seconds before pausing again.

So, is there a file format that I should change to from .avi that would make it easier for my old Pismo to play the films better?
Ta muchly
Steve
 
Try install perian codec plugin for quicktime.

You should uninstall the divx codec, its useless because perian can handle it too. http://perian.org/

Oh, didnt you have an old computer? That is the reason for the pausing, it cant keep up! You need more powerfull machine to play most current video formats (mp4) example xvid,divx,h.264...Older .mpg(VideoCD) movies and pure dvd(mpeg2) should play better. Just renaming the .avi doesnt do a thing. Avi is just a "container" for many codec variants.
 
If VLC won't play it and the DivX codec for QT throws s*** fits then you might just have to reside yourself to the fact that you downloaded a poorly encoded/corrupted porno :p

Oh wait, Pismo, could it be possible it's just to old and slow to decode modern codecs fast enough for viewing?
 
Hi again,
Yes, I realise my Pismo is like me, old and tired. The thing is that I like it. I can't see the logic of Apple making a laptop with these specs if it can't play a movie on the original DVD drive but hey ho. Thems the breaks.
So my second question still stands.
Is there a file format that will be easier for this laptop to run properly?
Ta muchly.

ps ... if anyone insults my Pismo, I'll send Vinnie round :eek: :D
 
why doesnt vlc play it,wot happens. vlc plays anything. i know sometime when i view a movie thats avi it ask if it should repair it,i normally say no and the movie starts,i notice that on pc aswell. maybe the file is corrupt,have you tried other formats and files
 
All the movies on the pen drive play fine on a 1GHz Compaq laptop.
All the films on the pen drive are .avi format.
Apart from this pen drive I only have films on original DVDs which play as they should on this Pismo.
 
Try taking the movies off the pen drive and download them to your computer. Then play the files from there. Large files have trouble operating through peripheral devices sometimes.
 
*old-guy* said:
Good thinking, Batman.
I'll try that idea later today when I fire the old girl up.
She's getting her beauty sleep at the moment, lol
Click to expand...

The Pismo will only use USB 1.1 which operates at <12mbps and it will not reach the maximum throughput if the processor is also handling video decoding so I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't play smoothly. You also have to remember that AVI is NOT a codec; it's simply a container for encoded video/audio. An AVI can have a whole host of different codecs and some of the newer ones simply will not play on a processor that is that old as they require a hell of a lot more power to decode, especially on a processor that lacks any sort of SIMD capabilities (ie: AltiVec, SSE*, 3dNow!). The processor can handle DVDs as the DVD drive allows for the proper throughput and, compared to some modern codecs, it requires significantly less effort to decode (at the cost of a larger file size).
 
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