AVI file not recognised

nikki

Guest

Ok I have read and read these forums,and am still stuck. I Posted this in the wrong place, it would be more suited to here I think. (sorry bout that)

I have lots of downloaded avis on my computer and have been watching/burning them no problem.

Now, I am D/Ling csi miami season2, and half of the files won’t play in ANYTHING, WMP, nero, realplayer, powerdvd, VLC. I am getting a “incompatibile. compressed with unknown codec” or something for most.

Also Gspot and AVIcodec do not recognise these as valid AVI Files. However the file extensions are .AVI and they are labelled as video files.

seems bizaare that some play while others won’t. Any ideas for me?

Regular
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Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,286

Usually tools like avicodec or gspot will recognize avi’s if the file is indeed an avi, regardless of what codec it is or whether it can be played. There’s three possibilities:
1. it’s not an avi. could it be in a different format? mkv for example? (if it was ogm, mpeg, or quicktime gspot would have detected it already) could it be a cd image (iso, cue/bin, other), or an archive (zip, rar)? Only trial and error via feeding the file into various programs can tell you what it is.
2. It’s an avi, but it’s corrupt beyond recovery. Sometimes files won’t transmit over the wire reliably. Hopefully you can download another copy of the file that is intact.
3. It’s a fake. Sadly there are people on file sharing networks that upload gigabytes (sometimes even terabytes) of random junk. Usually fakes can be detected using a hex editor [or wordpad]. If you open the file and see a bunch of zeroes [or blanks] at the start then it’s likely fake.