I'm sorry if this isn't the right place to put this, but whenever I try to watch the new SMRPG run, Media Player Classic always freezes up. What do you think the problem is? Why can't all the videos on the side be avi?
Have you tried with VLC player?
I suppose there are two main reasons:
1) The indexing data at the end of AVI files increases the file size by a surprisingly large amount. I don't have concrete numbers, but we are talking about things like a 20 MB video increased by 1 MB or something like that. (Does someone have any more concrete numbers, so that I don't spread too much BS?)
2) The AVI format, for some reason, is such that audio in ogg format cannot be embedded into it. The ogg format has a better quality/size ratio than mp3 (besides being patent-free).
MKV would also support multiple soundtracks, multiple video tracks and multiple subtitle tracks, although these features are seldom used in TAS videos.
I, too, prefer AVIs over MKVs.
I don't see why people must be forced to change their players. Are you being paid by VLC to encode videos in a format incompatible with Media Player Classic? I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
An AVI file with H264 video + mp3 audio maybe isn't the optimal choice but it's reasonably small and everyone can open it. But no, let's use MKVs so you can pretend you're cool and cause compatibility problems to many people.
That's certainly not true. And the steps required for your computer to be able to play h264 videos often automatically mean you will be able to play mkvs as well (at least if you make the easiest steps, rather than trying to kludge WMP to try to play them).
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Try the version of MPC here. Theres an old version left on sourceforge that has quite a few bugs and is awfully out of date.
No. We choose MKV because it's the better container. There are plenty of media players out there that support MKV so it's not like you have limited choice.
If you'd like more information on why MKV is better, Wikipedia has a good comparison page that summarises what each container does and does not support.
Please see above, and put a fence around your lawn if you don't want kids on it. Maybe a big sign post. It'll work, trust me.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
The movie doesn't load on the new version of MPC. I got my version of MPC from the combined community codec pack. Is there a way that I can make the new version replace the old version?
For some reason, it says that Media Player Classic is just a shortcut to mplayerc.exe which is in a folder that I couldn't find. I used my find tool to locate the program, and then I replaced the file with the new version.
I have a lot more problems with MKV than AVI, mostly because some of the videos freeze and give me problems on VLC. That, and when I make the player size bigger, there's a big quality loss. This wouldn't be a problem normally, but my desktop size is 1280 x 1024 and it makes the videos really, really friggin' small and difficult to see unless I maximize the window.
Another problem with MKVs is that they can't be uploaded on archive.org, and since some people don't like Rapidshare, those movies are doomed to have no mirrors.
Time for me to download all the emulators and look for good ROM websites, I guess.
I explained my point of view about how things should work more than once in the past. I sound like a rude asshole, yeah, but I hope you can read beyond my words, I'm not complaining for the sake of it, as I said I don't care only about myself, because I can just get all the emulators and all the ROMs and watch movies in that way. I'm lazy, yeah, but I can live with that.
My main concerns are for all the occasional visitors, which come here and have to deal with starving torrents to download videos that require you to update your codecs three times per day, all to save a few kilobytes in an era where DSL users are always more and more.
My personal opinion is that this is very wrong, file formats should be as simple as possible, and download options should be as simple as possible. Many and many people are going to be disappointed by this, I don't know if TASvideos' policy is to scare newcomers to keep them away, but I really have the feeling this website is getting more and more elitist as time passes.
Take this as an advice, not as a complain per se. I will enjoy my stay in this community anyway, but try for once to do what I do, and stop thinking only about yourselves, as there are other people in the world, and not everyone is a computer expert.
edit: to clarify further and summarize if one doesn't want to read a wall of text, my main point is that watching movies should be as easy as clicking on a link.
I'd personally suggest that in the first place for most people, if only because the size to quality ratio is, outside of certain ridiculously short movies (and the newly submitted psx castlevania movie), guaranteed to be better.
On the contrary, Having DSL or high speed internet does not necessarily mean that one will have infinite (or even a reasonable) amount of bandwidth at their disposal. Also, I've never updated my codecs on this machine after their initial install. Things still work just peachy.
To begin with, h264 isn't a "simple file format" that people would have just sitting around on their pc for no reason to begin with. Nor would xvid or divx be for that matter.
The people who would most likely watch these videos could check the faq (ok I just checked, and there isn't really much of a help section for mkv, but there is a mention of how to get it to work in the avi section anyway) for help on getting it to work.
One does not need to be a computer expert to realize that moving forward is better than stagnating. Just because something works, it does not necessarily make that something good. Although in the case of microsoft OS', the opposite can be said to be true.
MKVs still don't work. I hate how that all the new movies are now MKVs. This is complete bs. I don't want to download an entire new player just to run mkvs. If I do that it's going to change all those settings, and it'll just be a hassle.
How is it going to change your settings with your current player? If you don't want smplayer or vlc to change your preferences in which program to start when opening a file, you can usually tell them so in the install routine.
Although I do have to agree that there could be a little more detail on this on the page, the very first hit on Google upon searching for "matroska playback" (without the quotation marks) shows anyone using Windows how to play them back. If one was smart enough to come up with something like "Wait, what's that extension I'm downloading?" and just google for mkv, they'd land on the matroska page to read how to handle those files under Guides / Windows Playback. I know that you can't expect this from just everybody and I also know that quite some are rather unhandy with computers, but I'd say that 98% of the people visiting this website know Google and know the very basics of how to use it. That given, I don't see that much of problem at all.
If we actually did use a proprietary format absolutely nobody else had heard of or knew anything about it, I could understand; but not this way.
What is the problem in making a direct audio/video stream copy from the MKV to an AVI? Because it's a direct stream copy, the end result (ie. video and audio) will be identical to the original, but now it's just inside an AVI instead of an MKV. Unless I'm mistaken, you can do this rather easily with VirtualDubMod, mencoder and other similar software.
Stop complaining and do that.