VLC Media Player – Play Videos without Codecs
VLC Player – The Codec-less Media Player
A friend of mine was asking me about codecs the other day. He told me that he had spent hours downloading a video only to find out that it wouldn’t play on his computer. He told me that every time he tried to load the video he would get a message about the player trying to acquire the correct codecs.
He said that each time it would fail, and finally he gave up on trying to play the video altogether and deleted it from his hard drive. He seemed really frustrated about this because of the time and energy he spent trying to get the video to play only to end up deleting the file.
That was when I told him about VLC Media Player.
VLC player is a media player that does not require video codecs in order to play movies. In fact, VLC can play almost anything you throw at it without any trouble. This is great to know because how many times have you been sitting there trying to get a video to play, only to realize it was encoded with some strange video codec you had never heard of.
VLC will also play files that are corrupted or broken, with the parts of the video you actually have. This can be great for testing video clips, trying to recover a movie, or for purely experimental purposes.
VLC player is a free program that can be downloaded from Videolan.org. It is a very small download of less than 10 mbs and is used by millions of people around the world.
If you are new to VLC player I would highly recommend checking it out. Or if you are just looking for a new media player or are running into codec issues this is definitely the way to go.
Thanks for checking out Pseudorant! We appreciate the support.
Windows Movie Maker Hates My Samsung SC-DX10
Dueling Windows - Yet Again…
I just wanted to post a follow-up from yesterday. I spent most of the day trying to get my video together from the Kubuntu install I did yesterday.
The only problem with doing things the way I have been doing them, is that I am trying to do new things as I learn them, so the learning curve and troubleshooting involved is slowing down my progress.
Last night after working on Kubuntu for awhile I decided to transfer the video from my video camera to my desktop (running Windows XP) so I could edit the video and get it posted to the site. The goal is to eventually do a tutorial video on doing this through Kubuntu but for now I wanted to keep it easy.
Although it’s only really “easy” in the perfect world. When I woke up this morning and tried to import my video into Windows Movie Maker it seemed like it worked until I tried to do anything in the program at which point it would crash.
I tried several things in different programs like Virtual Dub, and tried different codecs etc. Finally I really felt stumped and looked online for some answers to my problems. It turns out I am not the only person with a Samsung SC-DX10 that is having problems trying to edit their video.
I started coming across tons of forum posts and blogs about people asking how to edit their video. They tried all different kinds of codecs, changing settings in FFDShow, editing video file headers, and using different programs all of which would either crash or return error messages.
Now apparently some people out there have other models of these cameras and kept telling people they were doing something wrong because it worked for them. After reading a very long forum post I came to find out that this specific model had a lot of trouble when it comes to editing because of the proprietary AVI format the camera records to.
The final solution that was reached on the forum was to use the Pixela Image Mixer software that comes with the camera to encode the clips to divx so they could be edited. I really didn’t like this answer but for now it seems like the only thing to do.
I tried encoding the file and got a really crappy looking encode from my original file that took forever to export. This just won’t do, so I went back online to try and find another alternative. The best answer I was able to come up with was to use Dr. DivX to output the divx file.
Once again it’s a divx file so it is terrible for editing and really slows my computer down, but it was much better quality than what Pixela offered. So after fighting with formats, software, video clips and codecs all day I am finally almost at a point where I have a working video to upload.
Please keep in mind that this is my first video period, whether it be for YouTube or as a tutorial. I was a little nervous when I was filming it so the first one is kind of rough around the edges. I am hoping as I make more videos that I can do a better job and continue to contribute some interesting stuff that will be of use to people.
Keep an eye out for the video tomorrow. I will try to get it posted to the site soon. For those who did not read my previous two articles the video outlines installing Kubuntu Linux onto my laptop.
Thanks again for checking out Pseudorant and if you have any friends that would be interested in the site please send them my way! I appreciate the support!
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