[time-nuts] OT - Feynman lecture series on Physics hosted by Microsoft

Rex rexa at sonic.net
Sat Jul 18 00:31:40 UTC 2009


GandalfG8 at aol.com wrote:
...

> 
>However, I have noticed that the avi file format does seem to be  
>continually evolving, in that I've quite often been informed that media player  
>couldn't open a recently downloaded avi file unless I installed yet another  new 
>or revised codec.
>To find it playing the audio but not the video under such circumstances was 
> not unusual.
>I seem to recall this happened even more frequently when I was using  Media 
>Player 9 so perhaps this might be at least part of the cause of your  
>problems.
> 
>regards
> 
>Nigel
>GM8PZR
> 
>  
>

AVI isn't really an encoding format. It is a container that can hold 
(typically) video and audio streams, and the streams could be encoded 
with a wide range of codecs. I haven't looked at the Feynman videos, so 
can't say how they may be encoded.

The VLC player is attractive because it is free and it comes with 
decoders for most of the popular codecs that may be encountered. The 
Microsoft windows players frequently don't handle all the codecs that 
are popular. One symptom is only hearing audio because that stream could 
be decoded but the video format was unknown.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave

The Quicktime mov files are similar in that they are also containers for 
different kinds of streams.






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