"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > I ever wondered myself, why they have to specify the filesize in the header,
> > as (IIRC) the data is already written in chunks so the could simply stop
> > loading/playing thhe file when there's EOF (or a bad chunk) ...
> > When it happens, that my File has some errors at the end, I still like to watch
> > the first part I got... this is only possible if the filesize in the header gets
> > adjusted ... thats so senseless/painful ...
>
>   That's not the whole story.
>   AVI is bad because it's not streamable. If you chop an AVI from the end,
> probably all players will refuse to play it. For some reason you need the
> *whole* AVI file in order to play it. (There might be some players out there
> which ignore these things and are able to play the AVI even if it has been
> chopped off, but at least MediaPlayer does not do this.)

but, doesn't that also depend on the used codecs?
AVI is only the container for the whole stuff ...

If I choose to convert a stream (under Windows) to an AVI, using the divX codec
it will create an *.avi file with (in theory) an streamable movie. What makes
it so worse under windows is, that the filesuffix doesn't mean anything to the
kind of file stored, as long as its linked with the mediaplayer. This prog decides
itself from the header, which codec it wants to use, so it's hard to tell, if the
AVI-file, you downloaded isn't an mpg in reality, vice versa. So it then can
happen, that you have the luck, to view it on your own computer, but giving it
someone else, who hasn't installed some senseless codec and he can't see anything
from the *.mpg...

... BTW: WMP isn't even capable of playing a RAW-PCM-Wavefile, that is truncated,
only because the length doesn't fit. The specification of the data is already in
the header (ie 44.1kHz,16Bit,Stereo) so it only needs something like "cat > /dev/dsp"
... silly wmp ...

Post a reply to this message