divx and windows

i was watching episode 22 of dl.tv and they were talking about publicdomaintorrents.com.  it turns out there are some real gems on this sight and they're in the public domain.

decided i would try both hosts favorite bitorrent client. patrick's was utorrent [that's a micro in the front there]. and robert's was azureus.

robert probably has the fastest machine ON THE PLANET because he's sticking with that client. the rest of us will see that it's HUGE and SLOW just like the rest of the java apps out there.

so i went to the site and that's  when i ran into some of the stupidity.

it was subtle but you could see fear of threats of legal action by riaa and the mpaa.

first off movies are only downloadable via bittorrent. that might be a great idea to save bandwidth, but you've eliminated the casual and  newbie end-user. and  the dial-up user. and  the user with a very flakey cable connection [snowzone raises hand]. bitorrents  are S-L-O-W for obscure files.

second the geniuses who go to all the trouble to crank out the movies in various video formats decided to NOT use a windows standard: wmv. and possibly locking out the mac and linux people . not really a problem because there are other cross-platform video formats. but the one they chose was the avi [divx] format. now that shouldn't be a problem either but it was.

you need to download and install a divx decoder. the latest as of this blog is divx 6.2. codec and now here's the interesting part:

it has all kinds of problems in windows xp sp2.

read that again. how many millions of machines are using that version? and there are a number of people having a problem [like me] because the knowledge base on the site was filled with problems and possible solutions.

i said possible because i spent ALL day yesterday trying to encode a public domain movie on legally purchased software/equipment and could not do it.

first problem the divx v6.2 codec would NOT install on my computer without rebooting before the install finished. ok, not a disaster, i just went  back a version, and that DID install ok.

next problem. windows xp sp2 didn't recognize the codec. windows media player didn't, winamp didn't, at least a dozen pieces converting software didn't. the bigfix program the divx site has available didn't work either. i went back to earlier versions [back to v5.0.2] and none of them were recognized.

i DO have a solution for the divx programmers. but i'm sure they won't like reading it. they can either:

• FIX THE GDF* PROGRAM


• STOP PROGRAMMING FOR WINDOWS

i tried using a few trial versions of programs that had built in divx codecs for converting and the closest one that worked converted a 733meg avi at 1hr 7min of playbackl file to a 17meg mpg at  1min 38sec of playback. so i'm just gonna guess here and say it didn't work.

anybody has a solution i'm all ears. email me

*gdf is some swear words

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