My Rant On Video Formats And Compatibility

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

Ok, well recently i bought a DVD Burner, and it works fine all to say, but i never knew that the DVD Roms had to be a certian format (DVD+R or DVD-R)so i had to buy the correct format of the roms, then i didn't know that the video that i wanted to burn to the DVD had to be a special format (.avi, .mpeg, etc...) so now i have to go through this whole conversion process, then i have to make sure that the format of the video is compatible with the DVD player that i want to play it on.. im like argh! what a nightmare!SO my ideal it, to scrap all video formats and come up with one, simple one, so no one has to go through any conversions, we dont have to wory about compatibility. annd things such as burning a Movie to a DVD Rom will not be as difficult as it is turning out to be -sigh- lmao

[icemarle 0]

Sigh... I know how you feel. Unfortunately, it will be very complicated to eliminate all the complexities in this world and bunching everything into one thing will never be simple. I remember you made a topic about having only one language... Well... I've observed that you really like things all-in-one, huh? ;I'm an avid watcher of anime and I use my computer to do the playback for me so I've dealt with different video formats and codecs myself. I've also tried encoding manually which is really a pain, I must say... (I taught myself how to subtitle)The problem with having only one format is that it won't be perfect... it will never be. Plus if there's only one format, people will find ways to secure it and make it something to gain profit from. The possibility of having it stay as the only format is low in the first place. That's the reason why a lot of formats exist.So... :/ sadly we must go about our own ways and accept the reality. I have a piece of advice to leave with you, however...You should do thorough research when you plan to buy something or when you're about to try something you've never done before. It saves time and the agony of failing to do exactly what you wanted.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

yeah, it is ashame that there are so many formats, and i wish there wasn't but i know there is nothing i can do about it. you ever wish that you could just wish for somthing and it would come true? i get that all the time! hahahaha

[Avalon 1]

This sounds like it is similar to other format issues we have had in the past and the current ones we have, for example, BETA vs VHS video formats, PC vs Mac formats. Each format, no matter what we are talking about have their benefits and drawbacks. I guess what we need is a format that combines all the good things of each of the formats, not an easy thing to do as each manufacturer/creator is trying to make their particular format #1.With video formats, we are rather fortunate that most modern DVD players will play almost any format, so it doesn't really matter too much which format you use to burn the DVD.As a side issue, I have had problems with using particular brands of blank DVDs with my burner. I have found TDK blanks seem to work OK but Verbatim do not. I thought both were reasonably good quality, but it seems not all blanks are the same. Anyone else had similar problems?

[fffanatics 0]

well there have to be many formats for DVD videos. The reason is that a dvd (like cd) must have uncompressed video. This means you have to convert it to MPEG format before you can burn it to the dvd in the same way you had to convert mp3s to wav format for cds. Nero software will do the whole process for you and also makes it easy to make menus. I personally do the whole process myself using CCE and Adobe Encore to make menus and Sony Acid to upmix the sound to 5.1 if it isnt already in it. There are soooo many guides on how to do this which makes it easy it just is time consuming on the CPU. I do most of the process while i sleep at night which is the way to go. For good guides, go to doom9.org.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

As a side issue, I have had problems with using particular brands of blank DVDs with my burner. I have found TDK blanks seem to work OK but Verbatim do not. I thought both were reasonably good quality, but it seems not all blanks are the same. Anyone else had similar problems?

Really, it must depend on the DVD Player then, because i am using Verbatim DVD+R's and they are reading fine in all my Home DVD players and my dad's work DVD players (he takes DVD's to work and watches them)

@ ffanatics, that's easy for you to say, most of what you just said there was French to me

[randomdood 0]

i don;t think i have the exact same rant as you but formats SUCK!!!!!!i mean itunes has it's own one, you have to change the extention to mp4 form m4v....and it's exactly the same!!!also mpg, wmv, AHHHHH it's all too much, all converters suck if there not paid for!!!! AHHH

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

i don;t think i have the exact same rant as you but formats SUCK!!!!!!i mean itunes has it's own one, you have to change the extention to mp4 form m4v....and it's exactly the same!!!
also mpg, wmv, AHHHHH it's all too much, all converters suck if there not paid for!!!! AHHH

lol yeah, and there are like 5 different formats of MPEG's so if you are trying to convert or anything you need to know exactly which type you have and it is a pain in the but to try and figure out.

like i said before, there should be one file type for video's and that is AVI, it is easy to understand, easy to encode/decode, and then for music/sound there should only be MP3 that would be awsome

[ghostrider 0]

like i said before, there should be one file type for video's and that is AVI, it is easy to understand, easy to encode/decode, and then for music/sound there should only be MP3 biggrin.gif that would be awsome

It would be REALLY nice if all the audio were just MP3s, but MP3s don't have all the data in them that wave files or .cda files have. They are compressed and certain small parts of the song are cut out, I remember reading about it once.

I know how you feel about video files, they have way to many damn formats. And the converters ALWAYS cost money. Audio is horrible too, I was trying to burn my friend Laura a CD, but Kb3 (the CD burner on Linux) didn't understand it. I had to switch to Windows, and that takes forever to load. I wish they would create something universal.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

really? because i have burned many CD's (CD's not DVD's) and they are all MP3 and it's never missing anything? i dunno what you read :)yeah, and when you convert it takes AGES for the darn video t convert wasting time, and if you want good quality and dont want it to skip, you can be running any other programs on the computer that will use up allot of RAM and CPU Usage carp... lol oh well >_< it can still be a dream

[Yacoby 0]

like i said before, there should be one file type for video's and that is AVI, it is easy to understand, easy to encode/decode, and then for music/sound there should only be MP3 that would be awsome

Although it would be easy for you, it wouldn't work as well for other people. I am not so knowledgeable about music formats so I will use image formats as an example. The same sort of thing applies for music formats.

If we just used .bmp for image formats, we would fill up our hard drives because of the huge sizes, and web pages would take ages to load. If we only used .jpg every time we saved an image, the image would lose quality. We also wouldn't have transparencies. A lot of computer games use .tga files, but others use .dds because it has mipmaps.

It is the same sort of thing for music, each format has its advantages and drawbacks.

[rsf 0]

Different formats are good for different things like people have said above me. To scrap all formats and make one basic one would ruin the reason for having formats. If all image formats were grouped into one we would loose the specialty of some to compress really big images and some to compress small images.I have had this frustration when uploading videos though. Most people have a flash plugin for their browser, but some people do not, so saving as a swf is not always safe. All pcs should run wmv fine but what about macs and linux? .mov for quicktime is a nice format, but lots of people on pcs will not be able to watch it without installing quicktime.So no format is perfect, but by making a sacrific here and there you can find some pros or having different formats. In my situation there are no pros to different formats, persay, but you see what I'm getting at.