[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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