Well, to be honest with you, this is not necessarily about finding the right video player for your movie. The truth is that video players require codecs to play video files. There are lots of great video players out there and virtually all of them can play AVI movies. First I will show you the best AVI video players, i.e. those that don’t require codecs, and then I will explain how you can get your AVI movie working in all other media players.

VLC Media Player

If you don’t want to hear about codecs and if you’re not attached to Windows Media Player, may I recommend VLC Media Player? The great thing about VLC Media Player is that it natively supports almost every video and audio format on the planet, including AVI. So if you’re looking for the best AVI video player in terms of convenience, you have just found it.

Key Features:

• requires no codecs for all standard and many other media files.
• decodes audio.
• supports subtitles.
• portable version available.
• open source and cross platform.

Care to learn more? Check out my article The VLC Media Player ““ Does it Really Play Everything?

You want options? OK, you shall have them. The fact is, there are at least five more players that provide native support for a great number of media files. One is KMPlayer, but it’s difficult because there is bad documentation. Others include MPlayer, Kantaris, and uPlayer. They’re all great in one way or the other, but I would like to speak more about…

GOM Player

GOM Player comes pre-packed with default codecs, so you won’t have to worry about them. When you first launch the player, it takes you through a setup process, which among other things let’s you choose from three playback modes: normal, high quality, and TV output. In other words, you can optimize GOM Player depending on what you want to do with it.

Key Features:

• comes pre-packed with standard codecs.
• codec finder for any missing codecs.
• can play broken AVI files (so can VLC).
• supports subtitles and subtitle editing.
• integrated screen capture tool.

Your Video Player Here

So you already have a favorite video player and you don’t want to install and learn about another piece of software? Fair enough. There is a solution for you too.

It doesn’t matter which player you have. It could be the good old Windows Media Player, Winamp, Media Player Classic, or maybe something more extravagant such as Mozilla’s Songbird. What unites all of them is that they require a codec to play back AVI and many other video file formats.

So this is where you finally get to learn about codecs. The word codec is an abbreviation of coder and decoder. In other words, the video was coded into a certain container, e.g. AVI and the media player software needs to decode it in order to be able to play it. The codec is a little program that helps your media player handle the decoding so that it can read and playback the video file.

When it comes to codecs, you have two options. You can either download one multipurpose codec that can handle most standard audio and video files. Or you can download a codec pack that contains all specific codecs for a wide range of media files. I recommend you save resources and go with the first option.

Multipurpose Codec:

• FFDShow

Codec Packs:

• K-Lite Codec Pack
• XP Codec Pack (runs on Windows Vista and probably Windows 7)
• Cole2k Media Codec Pack

So what are you going to do? Will you stick to your media player and which codec option will you choose? Or will you download one of the hassle-free AVI video players that comes with all necessary codecs pre-packed? It’s up to you! Let us know what you decided.

Image credits: Andrea Danti

Not long after incorporating YouTube, Google discontinued development of the Google Video Player in 2007. It also removed the option to download its hosted videos. As a consequence, the GVI format will slowly die out.

Do you still have videos in GVI format sticking around and wondering what to do with them? Would you like to know how you can download the remaining Google Video files? If you answered yes, continue reading as this article holds the answers to these questions.

What Are Google Video Files Anyways?

Essentially, Google Video (.gvi) files are RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format) files of the subtype AVI (Audio Video Interleave). Compared to regular .avi files, they contain an extra list with the FourCC “goog” right after the header. FourCC is short for ‘four character code’ and identifies the video codec, compression format, color or pixel format used in the media file. In plain English, this means that a simple manual modification of the Google Video file will yield a standard .avi file.

Note that most media players will actually playback Google Video files, including VLC Player, KM Player, and Windows Media Player. Isn’t it interesting though, that Google actually introduced its own file type and hence branded its videos?

So Can I Manually Convert A Google Video To AVI?

Yes. As Wikipedia points out, Google Videos are encoded in MPEG-4. Hence, for DRM-free videos, it’s possible to simply change the file extension from .gvi to .avi. However, that’s a very messy way of converting a file.

If you want to be safe, get a Hex editor and remove the list that makes the difference between the .gvi and .avi file. I used Freeware Hex Editor XVI32. It doesn’t require an installation, just unzip, run the .exe and browse for your .giv video.

The image below shows the sample file before (top) and after (bottom) editing. I removed the first LIST up until LIST2.

Simply click the first item you wish to delete and then click the [DEL] key until you have deleted the last item. When you’re done, go to > File > Save As… and enter a name. You will have to add the .avi file extension manually.

How Can I Automatically Convert A Google Video To AVI?

If you agree that renaming the file extension is amateurish and if you don’t want to mess with a Hex editor, a conversion tool is in order. There are several shareware and trial programs out there that promise to convert GVI to AVI. However, the free ones I tested are huge and not intuitive to use. By far the most effective and simple tool is described below.

Gvi2Avi

This tiny tool does a perfect job of converting .gvi files to .avi. It’s a 96 KB .exe file that does not need to be installed. However, it does require .NET Framework 2. The only real drawback is that you cannot mass-convert multiple files, the tool only handles one at a time.

How Can I Download Google Videos?

Google has removed the option to download its videos directly from the video page. However, there are tools available that can do the job for you. They will download in FLV or MP4 video format, so you won’t have to be worried about the GVI format.

PwnYouTube

For your future Google Video download needs, try the PwnYouTube Bookmarklet. Yes, it does say YouTube, but it actually works with Google Video and other video sources. And this is how it works…

1. Drag the PWNYOUTUBE Bookmarklet button to your browser bookmarks toolbar.

2. Visit a page with a YouTube or Google Video and click the Bookmarklet in your browser toolbar.

3. On the page you were re-directed to, find links to pages that allow you to download the file as FLV or MP4 files.

Basically, PwnYouTube is a hub for various online download services. For my Google Video source, SaveVid was the easiest option, while the others were rather disappointing. However, your results may vary depending on the source.

And this concludes our little excursion on Google Video and .gvi file conversion. You may now return to YouTube. If you are generally interested in video downloads or video file conversion, however, also have a look at these article:

• Watch YouTube Or Google Videos Inside Gmail Chat by Saikat
• Capture Streaming Video From Any Website With These 5 Tools by Steven
• 5 Easy-to-use Freeware Video Converters
• The Top Ten Dead Google Projects Floating About In Cyberspace
• How To Download A YouTube Video To Windows Media Player by Tina

What did you think about Google Video while it was still around and do you have a collection of GVI files?

Installing a subtitle ‘interpreter’, like we’re able to on a regular computer, holds no avail either. Drop an AVI and SRT subtitle file together on your console, and it’ll merrily ignore the latter.

People have succeeded in streaming movies with subtitles to their PlayStation 3 using ‘DLNA’, but even that isn’t foolproof and admittedly, requires far too much work and preparation. For a long time, hardcoding seemed the only viable option, albeit incredibly time-consuming. Little do most people know there’s a far easier solution to play AVI files on Playstation 3.

Since a few updates past, the PlayStation 3 supports *.DivX files, which are in fact AVIs with multiple subtitle stream. With a regular AVI and subtitle file, here’s how to make a DivX file in a flash. This tutorial will work on Windows, Mac OS X (Intel) and Linux.

Step One :: Find SRT Subtitles

There are a number of different subtitle formats, most of them simple text documents with embedded time-codes. The most popular one of them is SRT. Before we can cook up a subtitled DivX file, we’ll need said subtitles.

Although this tutorial also works with an idx/SUB pair, we won’t overcomplicate things and advise you to use an SRT file when available.

Luckily, it’s not too hard to find subtitles for a popular video – even in foreign languages. Take a look at one of our previous articles for more information, The 3 Best Subtitle Sources For Your Movies & TV Series.

Step Two :: Install Wine (Linux and Mac OS X)

(If you’re using a Windows computer, skip this step)

We assured the support of Linux and Mac OS X at the start of this article. Although the core application, AVIAddXSubs, is essentially a Windows application, it works very well with ‘Wine’.

Wine is a free computer program for Linux and Intel Macs that emulates a local Windows environment, and can run a large number of Windows applications – all without needing to install another operating system. Read more about the application in Varun Kashyap’s article, Run Windows Applications on Linux (or Mac) with WINE.

Linux users can use the ‘official’ Wine environment, Mac OS X (Intel) users are advised to download and install the WineBottler package. Once installed, you can use it to open EXE and other Windows-native files. If you have trouble with ‘corrupt’ subtitles, later in the tutorial, you might want to reinstall the application and also install the font packs that come with it.

Step Three :: Install AVIAddXSubs

With only 856KB, AVIAddXSubs is hardly a big application to download, but it’s a key component of this tutorial. Install it now. The application is native to Windows, but should just as well with Wine if you’re using Linux or Mac OS X (see step 2).

Step Four :: Mix Video and Subtitles to Divx

Because DivX files use the same video compression techniques as AVI files, mixing in the subtitles happens in a flash. Most work, like installing those applications, needs to be done only once. From now on, the process will hardly take over a minute of your time.

Open AVIAddXSubs and select both video and subtitles. Select or type the path to your AVI and SRT files. The video and subtitle paths need to be separated by a straight slash ( | ) – you might need to do this manually. For example, refer to the screenshot above. If you want, you can select up to eight different subtitle streams this way.

Hitting Start will commence file processing, which shouldn’t take long. The resulting DivX file has embedded subtitle streams and can be played on your PlayStation 3. To enable subtitles, simply press triangle during playback and toggle subtitle options like you would if you were watching a regular DVD.

Do you have any other subtitle- or PlayStation-related tips up your sleeve? Tell us what’s on your mind in the comments section below!