Any reliable way to preview DivX or XViD?

[komencanto]

I´m amazed that with all of the work the people at www.divx.com have put into their codec they´ve never bothered to make a proper program that previews incomplete video files encoded with it.

It is quite frustrating. AVIPreview is unstable and works only with some files sometimes.

Anybody know of any reliable way of doing this.

Presumably it would work the same with XViD as well, right?

[Jim_MDP]

What do you mean by incomplete?

Do you want to grab a sample torrent and check the quality?

There are tools that let me do that on my Mac, but Skeptoid doesn't allow discussion of alternate platforms. ;)

Oh and yes… DivX/3ivx rock. Xvid's not bad and Ogm is the best. Rare and esoteric, but the best.

[Theodore Kurita]

Might I suggest this:

http://divfix.maxeline.com/


I use this one frequently.

Not anywhere close to being very buggy. :)

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Divfix usually works for me too. Also, I use BSPlayer as my primary media player, and it will usually play incomplete AVI's. It takes a while to load them (I guess because it is searching for the missing information normally at the end of the file), and then gives a popup warning that the file is corrupted, so seeking will be slow. Then it plays the file. You can't skip ahead, but it works for making sure that you are downloading what you thought you were, and that the video quality is OK.

Dr. Stupid

[davidhorman]

It is quite frustrating. AVIPreview is unstable and works only with some files sometimes.

Well that's probably going to be the case with most programs because the AVI files are incomplete :D. They only have one header at the beginning which is pretty important, and there is also an index of frames which is used for seeking - this is at the end of the file so if it's missing, it needs to be reconstructed - VirtualDub will do this, but it can take a long time, and seeking will be slow. VirtualDub also has a "rekey" option, or something like that, which makes seeking quick again but takes even longer to get going than reconstructing the index.

David