Guy Adams on Technology

It’s a rarity these days that me and the wife get a couple of hours to sit down together and try and catch up on our favorite TV shows but last night we had some time and decided to watch Heroes. I have recorded the episode’s using my MSI Digivox II digital TV capture card so that I can transfer the video to my laptop and play it on our bedroom LCD which has a VGA socket. This works perfectly assuming I have my laptop, which last night due to a meeting was left at work.

 So as a work around I decided to move my home PC into the bed room and hook it up to the LCD for the evening. On my laptop I have Windows XP Pro with Media Player 9 and this plays the .AVI files perfectly, on the desktop is Vista Ultimate with Media Player 11 which plays the video and audio of the .AVI files, but about 30 seconds apart. So you see Hiro speaking and all you can hear is Peter Petrilli who was in the previous scene. I tried adjusting the limited WM11 settings but nothing made it watchable. Highly frustrated with this I wasn’t going to let this spoil the evening so I moved the home PC back to our home office, plugged into the internet and downloaded Real Player and Quicktime player, the installation of both took far too long only to discover they needed to then download codecs, I allowed the download of codecs but both couldn’t play the files. Neither of these media playing Goliaths could play a simple .AVI file which my mobile phone can!

Even more angered by this experience I downloaded DivX Player, this installed in half the time of the others and worked perfectly, instantly. Not only that the quality is far superior to even WM9.

So a big thank you to DivX, for saving my evening.

Have you had any problems like this? and what is your favorite media player for playing video file formats?

Tags: DivX, MSI, Quicktime, Real, WMP