Decoders, Encoders, Bears O My!

CEldin

<div class="IPBDescription">what the hey ho?</div> I'm a Whose Line is it Anyway nut who just discovered ww.IdiotSite.com, the source for all my Whose Line downloading desires. The problem is that they are encoded or decoded, or whatever in something that I dont have, I think its Realtime player (not realplayer, have that). I've got Windows XP and havn't got a clue as to how to fix this.

Perhaps theres some program with all the decoders?

May we all live long and prosper.

CEldin

teh bumpage.

CEldin

needa teh answers?

Sky

I don't know the answer, but I'm bumping this to be nice <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Crono5

Download Realplayer or search for the codecs or something.

SoulSkorpion

All "encoded" means, in this context, is the way the movie data is layed out in the file. There is a wide range of different ways of representing movies on computer - a wide range of different ways of <i>encoding</i> a movie into a form that a computer can read. The reason being that there are different advantages and disadvantages for different methods - some are higher quality, some are smaller file size, etc.

The thing is, media players don't automatically understand every new way of arranging the data. Unless they know what the format of the file is (how the movie data is arranged in the file - how it is "encoded") they can't understand it, and can't play it. That's what codecs do. A codec is basically instructions for how to read movie files that are encoded in a certain way.

So, basically, all you have to do is update your media player with the right codec for those videos. Fortunately, you can probably do this quite easily just by downloading and installing a package of commonly used codecs.