Differnt formats

desdichato

Baseband Member
Messages
37
Guys,

I've been downloading some movie files onto my HDD, and I am wanting some info.

The first things is the files are coming down in various formats (MKV, AVI, RAR etc) is there a "standard" that I can convert them all to????

Those files that come down as AVI are frustrating me because some I can play on my viewer (Irfanview) without any other changes and others I cannot play and this is especially frustrating when it is the second part of an episode....any suggestions

finally is there a site that I can go to to update all my codec????

Any information will be greatly appreciated.

P
 
Downloading torrents is an easy way to get stuff you really don't want, such as malware. </PSA>

Different people have different preferences when it comes to format-- some prefer higher quality at the expense of file size. Others need to conserve storage space (not to mention uploading/downloading times are affected by file size).

.rar is a compression scheme, BTW, so you'll have to uncompress the file before trying to play it.
 
And just for the record, those are all considered standards (even RAR is a standard, but as Dngrsone said it's a compressed file similar to a zip). That said those "standards" are simply containers. Below the surface an avi file can have many different sets of attributes that can alter the playback experiance on different device.
 
MKV and AVI are video packaging. Each video package type may contain different video codecs. The video format (codec required) may be or mpeg2, 3, or 4, as well as others. One simple way to standardize them is to transcode them with Handbrake. Simply open Handbrake, choose the video file you want to transcode and click the start button. The default Handbrake output should work well for you. One of the cool things about handbrake is that it's available for Windows, Linux and MAC operating systems.
 
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