Hi! I love the movies that have been made here and I am trying to share them with memebers of my Glider club to get them interested in Flgiht Simulators. There is just one problem, most of them don't have video players that will play .AVI files and are unwilling to download one. I am trying to find a way to convert some of the .AVI movies that I have downloaded from this website to share wtih them but have met with no success. The only converter I got to work only gets the audio and not video (it shows up as a blank screen). Any suggestions??

well... if u have sony vegas... just import the movie, and render it as a .wmv file..

or..

u can try this:

converter thingy


cheers! and gl

hi riper-snifle,

which player should it be not playing avi-files? imo, all software players are able to do so.

but have in mind, that 'avi' is a container-format, which means, it only coordinates audio- and video-streams. most probably the video is compressed by a codec, which is not installed in your friends' system (or which can't be used by the regarding operation-system).

in any case, converting means in most cases recoding the video, which means, you need some experience and it will suffer from quality-loss.

so, for sure it is not the 'avi'-format, which your friends can't handle.
most videos here are in 'wmv' or 'avi' ('divx' or 'xvid' coded). if your friends use windows, they can playback 'wmv' (maybe the media-player needs an update anyway) and for others the installation of 'xvid' should enable them to playback also 'divx' (i recommend 'xvid' because of the small size and no additional player, like 'divx' does)
if they use mac-os, it depends on the version - conversion to 'wmv' won't solve the problem here. they should read at 'apple/quicktime' website what to do.

I understand.... you want to be able to show them on a VCD/DVD player attached to a TV.... not a computer

try looking in the download sites for something which makes a CD from your home movies...

my Fuji digital camera came with something similar on it's CD

I use Nero Vision Express to covert and then burn my avi movies on a true dvd. It gives excelent view on TV. But you will need the right codecs for the convert process.
Good Luck !

Well, what you can do is hook up yer PC to a TV and play yer video files that way. Although, that doesn't work if your PC isn't in the same house as the TV I suppose.

But yeah, Nero works fairly well with doing VCDs. Haven't tried doing DVDs though, so I dunno. But Nero does seem to be the thing to use. Of course there are probably loads of other stuff around, just depends on yer preference I s'pose.

hi riper-snifle,

sry, i misunderstood it, seems.

if you'd like to present the videos on a tv-screen (or share them for others to watch on tv), you can use 'nero' best for converting/burning the collection(s) on dvd - like said above already.

however, if you haven't got 'nero' (using windows own burning program or others), it is also lots of fun to create old-fashioned vcd.
since you have to recode the videos anyway, there is no real advantage to use the dvd-format and, imo, the vhs-like quality of vcd is pretty good for the low pal/ntsc-resolutions.
for recompressing the free version of
tmpegenc v2.52
offers excellent quality, for structuring (and even creating chapters for vcd) the last free version of
vcdeasy
is working well (and is also linked and makes use of 'cdrdao', an open-source burning program).

after all vcd fits well for 40-50 min video on a single cd.

What about using (if you have VISTA) the Windows DVD maker? I had not used it myself as I use other applications for video capturing, rendering,etc……but I did try it out just now and I imported three FS movies/files from my hard drive, which i had previously over teh years downloaded...one file was AVI (probablyDivX encoded), one specifically an XVid encoded AVI, and one Windows Media Video (WMV). Two mouse clicks later and all three movies were being burned to a DVD, in NTSC (USA) TV format. Piece of cake…no fuss, no muss. Plays just fine on my TV/DVD player. I didn’t mess with creating any sophisticated menu or other bells and whistles.

I don’t know anything about Windows XP, if similar DVD-burning app is included with XP.

People Bitch about VISTA all the time, but it does have some built in stuff which comes in handy from time to time.