Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Jerie was kind enough to send me a lovely educational video about a certain mythological Sikh warrior, and I was faced with the challenge of playing the .avi file in QuickTime.

On my first attempt at double-clicking on the file, I got neither audio nor video. I suspect that was a codec problem, but you never know when the traditional .avi advice of changing the file type and creator will clear up something like that. I didn’t follow it, but if you’d like to give it a try, see this MacOSXHints hint.

For my part, I dived immediately into .avi conversion using DivX Doctor II, and the Doctor kindly converted most of the file to .mov. However, DivX Doctor chokes on audio errors, so the soundtrack ended about two-thirds of the way through the .mov.

At this point Jerie showed up and we discussed the nature of the audio track. I’d figured since it was broken it must be wma, but she claimed it was mp3. Such philosophical questions are best answered with DivX Tool, which verified Jerie’s story and explained a bit about .avi audio problems. DivX Tool can extract mp3 audio for reinsertion, so I obtained a fine .mp3 soundtrack.

However, I would have needed to use QuickTime Pro to paste the soundtrack back in so it would play. That, my readers, would have involved money, and I was running a purely fair-use operation.

So I read through some of the articles at the 3ivx forums, and found some very helpful advice - namely, that to cure these pesky audio bugs it may suffice to run the .avi through the DivX Validator.

The DivX Validator is a secret ingredient of DivX. I downloaded the Pro trial version, but the free version may suffice for all I know. Once the original version of my educational video was validated, it could play in QuickTime right from the “converted” .avi file.

I just checked that the soundtrack had lasted all the way to the closing credits, because I didn’t want to play from the converted file. I still haven’t bought that new iMac, so my mac is a bit pokey for playing video. DivX Doctor seemed like a better bet for the pokey problem, so I converted my converted file to .mov with DivX Doctor, opened it up in QuickTime, and…voila! Education!

The one other program I downloaded in this process was a QuickTime full-screen viewer. Normally only QuickTime Pro will play in full-screen mode, but there are several free solutions to the problem available. I forget which one I downloaded.

[Addenda] It was PresentMovie from ThankYouWare. Now I’m downloading QiPo (QuickTime in, Preview out) to extract some screenshots.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.