About Video and Audio Codecs

For those of you who paid it forward AND have never downloaded our online videos before, you may have come up with a problem where you can hear the video but cannot see anything sensible. This problem, and it’s solution, are described below.

If you find in the end that all this tech stuff is a little too difficult to get your head around, you can just stick to good old faithful DVDs. Here are a few that we’ve listed recently: Click on the pic to go to the listing and make your purchase.

If you try to play a video from Jivemecrazy and find that you can hear it but can’t see anything, or what you can see is just a scramble of weird colours, this is because you are missing a “codec”. The codec we use is DivX. It is a very common codec for transport of high quality video. You can download it for free at their site: www.divx.com
What is a codec?

“Codec” stands for coder/decoder. It is an algorhythm that is used to compress video data when the video is created. To “compress” it means to attempt to reduce the file size without a proportionate loss in quality. While the “coder” part is used to create the video, the “decoder” part is used to view the video file.

Windows uses lots of codecs, some of which you may be familiar with like WMA (Windows Media Audio), WMV (Windows Media Video) and MP3 (an audio codec initially developed by Fraunhoffer). Divx is not shipped with Windows at this stage, but many set-top DVD players now come with the codec chip, so they can play DivX files right on your TV.

You only have to install it once.

Once your computer knows how to interpret Divx Video files, it will automatically use the DivX algorhythm whenever you try to play DivX video files so you won’t have to install it again.

If for some reason, you can’t hear the audio either, you may be using a machine that doesn’t have MP3 installed. You can also download an MP3 codec here http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php

If you need further assistance with this issue, please feel free to call us on +61408826455.
We are in Australia (time zone GMT +10) so please be considerate about timing.