Questions about Video Formats on Computer
 

A small question about video formats on the old computer. I'm fairly computer illiterate so my question is what are the AVI and mov formats when it comes to video? And, along with that, what plays said formats?

Thanks so much guys and girls.

PMF 21

this is more of a computer question than an electronic one ...

very simplified answers without running to google ...

.avi is divx or xvid.
mov is quicktime.

'media player classic' is a good player for avi.
videolan i believe is the name of another commonly used one.
both are free.
you can of course also use windows media player, but I avoid it.
For mov's, you can use quick time ... or i believe there is a prog called 'quicktime alternative' (similar to 'real alternative').

you *may* need codecs to play back the videos .. but don't randomly install them unless you do. If you do, google for klite codec pack.

if you get something that you can't play back, there's a program called 'gspot' that will tell you what codecs were used in encoding a video, so you know what you need.

hope this at least gets you started in the right direction :)

also moving to computer forum ...

I've read a lot on the internet where codec packs have caused problems. I'm not really sure why they do, but it's just as easy to get each codec as necessary.

Winamp will play most things, and BSplayer will play even more. It even plays quicktime (although a bit buggily).

some codec packs can be problematic, yes ... the infamous 'nimo' for example.

i recommended the klite, because it is pretty well regarded as 'safe'.

I'd also recommend the one I use, the Gordian Knot Kodec pack, which is avail in the downloads section of doom9.

AVI is a Microsoft-defined file format, Audio Video Interleave. It's basically a container for audio and video that may be encoded in an arbitrary format. The most popular now being implementations of MPEG4 like DivX for video and probably still MPEG layer 3 for audio (i.e. MP3).