I'm posting this guide here so then I can link all my old releases to this thread.

All my latest movies were encoded using XviD and Mencoder under GNU/Linux, and were only playable under Windows (except with some players which didn't use the default Windows' avi-playing infrastructure). With the help of many friends (let me at least name Faeton@DXC, LastNinja2@ItaloDome, the pals at Doom9, and Fitz@FH for testing) we found out that for some reasons the default Windows avi-splitter was trying to interpret a part of the header that has no meaning for this file format and so it's junk. Luckily there's a quick and easy fix to it.

1) You will need an hex-editor: I don't use Windows, but I was informed from a reliable source that one of these free hex-editors will be enough for what we're trying to do:

ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/win95/ ... xfre20.zip
http://www-physics.mps.ohio-state.edu/~ ... exedit.exe

2) We are going to work on the .avi file, so if you are not 100% sure of what you're doing please do a backup copy of the file.

3) Open the avi file in the hex-editor. You will see something like this:



Note the highlighted part: that's the junk that make Windows' avi-splitter stumble. We only have to delete it: to do that we overwrite that part with ASCII zeroes (not the character 0). After zeroing out the offending string, you should see something like this:



4) Save the file. It will now work flawlessy. Ask in the forum if you have doubts .

:banana:

Yup! We nailed that damned (windows) bug in the end

So, is it possible that you can do this before release in the future, or will it marr Linux compatibility?

linux players play the most broken avis you could imagine
but as i understand it, the change doesnt break the avi at all.
trep, you can use this as the final step for your future rips:



(with a backup at hand, you'll never know)

EDIT: at a second thought, it only works only if the offending string always starts after byte 196 from the beginning, which i dont know if is always true (avi headers should be of fixed length but who knows).

As obviously there's no way to tell microsoft to fix their avi-spliiter, I wrote on the mailing-list of Mplayer (that is, the software I use to encode) and they fixed it in no time so that it won't write any more that string on the headers So next rips will not have this problem any more. You see that having the source code free works .

I don't know why linux ppl should care what windoze users can or can't do. They don't care either for other systems. When I encounter a windoze only proprietary format like .chm (hate this one), I don't start whining, but see to work around myself. A few times I was picked on, when I released something in tar.bz2 format. So what? This is the standard linux archive format. Did I change anything? Certainly not.

Because we're the good guys! Also, keeping junk out of headers seems a good idea, even if MS apps weren't stumbling on it.

Btw, I hate .chms and .mhts too Thanks god I've found a way to handle them both:

http://66.93.236.84/~jedwin/projects/chmlib/ (for chms)

and:

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14315 (for mhts)

I am definitely not. And never will be.

Great to see you finally solved it!