Ok, so I'm new. I downloaded a video last night, its 756Mb and is a dvix.avi. I can't play it or open it. I want to put it on a dvd, but whenever i try to open or load it the program i use just hangs. Do i need to convert it first? if so to what?
Yes, you need to convert it. More, you need to study a little, first, ot you'll waste lot of time and CDs. And if you read some guides in http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/, you'll learn how to do that.
A personal sugestion: making a DVD movie from a 700-900 megs AVI is useless. Better to sticky to poor VCDs (http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/110106) or SVCDs (if the AVI's quality is very good and the movie's length is <= 110'). You'll worsen very little the final quality of the movie and the job is much easier (a little longer for SVCDs, but feasible).
No, you don't necessarily need to convert it.
Get GSpot, open the AVI, find out what codecs it needs, download and install them, watch the video.
If you want it on CD or DVD, then there's a whole 'nother bunch of stuff you need to do.
Start by finding out what codecs it needs, and get those installed.
I don't agree. TMPGEnc, for instance, can convert some compressed sounds (like AC3) only if you have a proper AC3 plugin installed. And this is true even if you can hear the AVI (and therefore, you have the proper sound codec on your PC)!
Therefore, if you wand to make a mpeg from tah AVI, you don't need to 'find' which necessary codec you need to have. This is true only for the video, not for the sound, too.
Heh, we're just outlining different portions of the process.
First he needs to have it play properly on his computer.
Second he needs to encode it to dvd mpeg-2 (or (S)VCD.
Third he needs to author it (skip this unless you want a DVD).
Fourth he needs to burn it.
I just didn't want to jump ahead to encoding until he could actually watch it on his computer <grin>
