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Home::Multimedia
It's Getting Harder to Watch Movies
Author : Jim Hoffman
After a long, exhausting day you came home, had your dinner and
then sat in front of the TV looking for a nice relaxing movie.
Nothing! Then suddenly you remembered that you bought the CD of
the new, Oscar-winning movie "Million Dollar Baby". You took out
your laptop, inserted the first CD and hit "play". To your
surprise, the only thing you could see was a green screen. You
took out the CD, cursing at the media market that gave you a
"broken" CD for the fifth time. Tried the second CD; again the
frustrating green screen. First thing in the morning, you took
your "broken" movies and went to the shop. Having yelled at the
owner of the shop for five minutes, you suddenly noticed the
cynical smile on the guy's face. Having the opportunity to talk,
the shop keeper said "CODEX".
All you needed were the codecs for these movies. They were not
broken; they were just coded in a "foreign" language to your
media player. The codecs were the dictionary that your laptop
had to use to translate the absurd computer language to the nice
scenes of the movies.
Every video, audio, picture or even word document files are
coded in a different way. In the case of big data entries like
movies, the computer has to use different algorithms to compress
the data so that the size does not exceed the standard limits.
We see this compression in PDF files (Acrobat Reader), in MP3
files (WinAMP), in MPEG files (movies), in each and every data
storage file that you can imagine. While the compression is
being done, the programs use some kind of a dictionary. Without
these "dictionaries" (codecs in the case of video and audio
files) the code would seem as meaningless to the player or the
viewer as it is to you. So you have to install certain codecs to
be able to use certain files.
Some codecs replace the repetitive symbols over the file, ome
codecs changes the aspect ratio of the movie; some of them
decrease the quality of the picture and yet, all of them turn
gigabytes of data into fair size that can fit into a CD or a
DVD.
As the user demands increases, codecs are multiplying in a
logarithmic scale. There are several codecs that are musts for
movie fans, however. You should install most of these if you
don't want to be disappointed.
1. MPEG4 - It is the default codec which is already included in
WMP. 2. DIVX - A series of sound and display codex which come
with shareware DIVX player. 3. XVID - Relatively new, one of the
most used video codecs. 4. AC3 - Most common sound codec. 5.
Intel Indeo - Rather useful series of codec which a new version
pops out everyday.
Overall the way movies are encoded is changing day by day.
Everyday we see a new aspect ratio. Everyday we encounter a new
codec. To many, it would seem that it is getting harder and hard
to watch movies. The least you can do is to download a codec
viewer program which would help you on your quest for a pleasant
evening.
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