help! movies stopping in the middle?

[TBPDPTI]

I hope this topic hasn't been posted b4, but I have been having some problems with some of my downloaded movies. I am trying to watch a few movies, some of which work, others of which do not; the ones that do not stop sometime in the middle of the movie, usually within 20 mins of the start. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fic this? Is there a codec that I need? I use divX coded version 4.12 and divx player version 2.5. Please help!

[admin]

According to the new forum rules that will be in place officially soon, this post would have been deleted since it violates the new rule (mention of "downloaded movies", which suggest piracy) :

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?threadid=28245

[TBPDPTI]

Okay, all of the movies I downloaded from Bearshare. Therefore they are perfectly legal. I'm sorry about those rules. I am new here and had not read through them; likely because they are not in place yet. Does anyone else know the answer to this problem? Thanks.

[admin]

Okay, all of the movies I downloaded from Bearshare. Therefore they are perfectly legal.

That's not really true. Bearshare is a file sharing program (a Gnutella client), and file sharing is the main way pirated movies are distributed these days (the new rules are specifically designed for pirated movies from file sharing networks). It seems that the authorities are going after file sharing at the moment with full force ...

Anyway, the rules are not officially in place, so that's why this post hasn't been deleted.

As for your question, this sort of sounds like the DivX freezing problem, which can happen when movies are not encoded properly. Does the video come back if you move the playback slider? If so, then you can try fixing this by using the DivX AntiFreeze filter :

http://www.tac.ee/~prr/videoutils/

Another possible problem could be a corrupt or incomplete file, which can be fixed by tools like DivFix :

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/divfix.html

(make sure you backup the movie before fixing it, as DivFix will stop at certain errors and cut off the rest of the file).

Another more difficult way is to use VirtualDub to re-write the file (VirtualDub will detect errors and try to fix it) :

http://www.virtualdub.org

Open your AVI file in VirtualDub, set audio and video processing to "Full Processing Mode" (use the drop down Video and Audio menus to change this option) and save the AVI file as a new file.

You should also update your DivX codec to the 5.x version, since 4.x is no longer supported by DivXNetworks.

For the movies that don't work, try using to find out which codec your movie was encoded with, and download that codec :

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/gspot.html