The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Monday, March 08, 2004
.:1:44:24 AM:.
There are codecs out there...
I'm talking about Free codecs. Say you formatted your hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Say that the computer seems to work fine in all respects except for playing DVDs. Windows Media Player doesn't seem to play them and says that it can't find the codec. What do you do?
A codec is a set of equations/algorithms to transform the bits on a DVD/CD into video and sound. When you listen to MP3s you are using a music codec. When you watch DivX videos you need a video codec. Similarly with DVDs you need a video codec, MPEG 2 to be more specific. The inclination is to use WinDVD Player, to install it on your computer because (I believe) it comes with the codec. The problem is that WinDVD is NOT free. These days launching a search on 'Free _____' is nearly disastrous (even on the beloved Google). You have to approach it from a different angle. After a quick search I found this 1.5 MB MPEG 2 codec :) Enjoy!
