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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. Paul
It's not doing stupid things, it just didn't have the codecs installed. Was it Windows XP by any chance?
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?
IIRC 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.
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.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/MultimediaCodecsDon't get me wrong, I'm not standing up for Windows, but I'd hardly call it a Windows fail.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq