AVI Conversion?

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 7/29/03 at 5:55 PM, Sean W.Gallagher <swg at greatertalent.com>
transmitted the following electronic message:

>
>I've got this AVI that QuickTime will not open. It gives that standard 
>AVI message that it has a "compressor that quicktime does not 
>understand". Does anyone know of a program that will convert it? I 
>tried cleaner but it came out blank. I'm also trying to show up the PC 
>user that created it who told me that the reason I can't open the file 
>is that "Macs suck".
>

Sean,

While it's not guaranteed, the odds are quite high that the AVI in
question is a DivX of some sort. The easiest way to convert that to, say
MPEG, is to use ffmpegX (shareware download, available via Version
Tracker).

Assuimng that it is one of the many varieties of AVI that ffmpegX
recognizes, choose your desired destination format from the Presets
popup at the bottom of the window, sit back and wait while it launches
Terminal and does the conversion.

One caveat, remove any quotes or other "funny" characters from the
filename as they don't always get "escaped" properly when fed to the
unix tools that do the conversions.

If all you want to do is play the file, download either vlc (VideoLAN
Client) or MPlayer (or both) and attempt to play it there. They both
play a wide range of oddball Windows formats.

-- 
Dennis Cohen
Mac Digital Photography (Sept 2003)
iLife Bible
Mac OS X Bible
and other titles