I hate Bill Gates because he is ultimately responsible for the WMV video file type. I was messing around with some old videos I captured from VHS a few years ago. They were all in AVI format, so too big to put on the Web. I was looking for a way to compress them, preferably to MPEG format and found Windows Movie Maker on my computer. It came with Windows XP, so I assumed it was lame and had never tried it.
Well it looked good to start with. It was similar to Adobe Premiere, which I’ve used before, but a lot easier to work with. Everything looked good until time to save to a video file, and the only option was WMV. Only readable by Windows Media Player as far as I know. Mr. Monopoly, Bill Gates, forcing me to force my visitors to use his Media Player.
So the videos were edited and up, and it was time to test them on my other computers. Except for my Mac, which doesn’t have the Windows Media Player installed. All that was left was to bring the videos up on my kids’ computer, which I did only to find fluorescent green freakishness. A quick search for another WMV file confirmed that my video card cannot properly render that file type. Another search for troubleshooting on the subject told me that the problem was due to updated graphics card drivers, and you’re supposed to roll back your drivers to the previous version to solve the problem. Cool, I’ll just put some text under the video links that say “To properly view this video, please roll back your graphics card driver to the previous version.”
Thanks again Bill Gates.
#1 by JD - November 14th, 2005 at 09:10
The DVD-ripping scene likes the divx format…