DivX5 codec SLOW with Windows Movie Maker

[eean]

Background:

I've just got in a class set of digital cameras for making movies. They are great but they take movies in Quicktime .mov format. So I have a little program that converts that into .avi but they are still encoded in divx5 format.

 

Problem:

So I download the divx codec from divx.com. Movies run instantly in Media Player (you can see the divx icon pop up in the systray) they even import into Digital Blue Creator using Direct Show drivers. But they can take 1 minute to load into Windows Movie Maker (even short clips). The divx systray icon pops up and goes away several times.

Using commercial codecs (like with power dvd) the same clip imports in under 15 seconds.

Anyone know of any other free (or cheep site licence) DivX5 codecs?

 

I've tried:

- Using ffdshow (opensource divx codec) - nearly as as bad + it isn't enabled in Movie Maker by default.

- Using a DivX tool to switch off the task bar icon.

[sahmeepee]

We use Koepi's xvid encoder here (free). Xvid is generally better than divx for size vs quality. To be honest you should try to avoid editing compressed files as it'll always be slow and annoying compared to uncompressed avis or DV.

 

Try taking a look at videohelp.com - it has all sorts of useful guides, software etc.

[eean]

But I'd have to get them into XVid format first? How do I do that?

I'm currently using Mp4Cam2Avi which just converts the .mov carrier to .avi (not sure if I'm using the right termonology?) but doesn't recompress, so it is, apparently, quicker with no loss of quality in the process.

This program is handy because I can script it and it's opensource. I've hijacked the windows autorun popup so 'Copy and convert' is an option when they plug the camera in.

 

To be honest you should try to avoid editing compressed files as it'll always be slow and annoying compared to uncompressed avis or DV.

I think uncompressed avi might get on the large size as my kids filled up 128mb of memory (divx compressed) in 7 minutes! I did some editing in moviemaker with my 6/7 year olds today. 640x480 30fps files - 15 laptops (256mb ram & 1.4ghz) running off 1 g access point. Amazingly the whole thing didn't melt - but we are talking 2 minute movies not feature length films here!

 

Thanks for the link - I'll check it out.

[sahmeepee]

Video editing over wireless is pretty brave in itself! Within those contraints I'm not sure I can suggest anything else. Possibly you could send the video clips to the laptops then decompress them to uncompressed AVIs on the laptop end. Although they'll be big files the laptops should probably have enough space.

 

Possibly this search on videohelp will throw something useful up:

 

http://tinyurl.com/hw2ac

[eean]

Video editing over wireless is pretty brave in itself!

I know, but amazingly it worked (Video editing with six year olds, however, is just foolhardy!).

It's not at all slow, except for this unnecessary delay on importing and that only becomes a problem when opening a previously saved moviemaker file, because it basically re-imports every moviemaker clip. This delay is caused by the lousy progamming of the divx.com codec, not the format itself.

 

Possibly you could send the video clips to the laptops then decompress them to uncompressed AVIs on the laptop end.

Good idea but sounds quite complicated - kids couldn't do that, so it would have to be done programmatically. Then at the end of the lesson it would have to recompress and send them back.

Thanks for the link - I'll try out some of their codecs.