Chazography

I watch quite a lot of DivX encoded videos (primarily things that I’ve recorded from TV or movies I’ve ripped for travel). Recently, however, my DivX content started playing back extremely poorly (e.g., jerky, choppy, out of sync, etc.), and it was really starting to bug the heck out of me. So I embarked on what would be an extremely time consuming and frustrating endeavor.

Where to start? Google always comes to mind, and so, I started my queries. From what I gathered from Google, these quirks were symptomatic of old codecs or video drivers. Wonderful, I had the latest version of video drivers from Dell, and I’d already installed the latest version of the DivX codec. I proceeded to do a little more Googling to see if there was anything else that might help. A large number of sites from my new queries recommended the use of ffdshow to play back XviD and DivX encoded movies so I tried installing it to no avail. What in the world could be going on?

Curious, I decided to see if nVidia was offering any drivers newer than the ones on Dell’s site. As it turns out, the latest ForceWare drivers were more recent than the Dell drivers. However, I’d learned from the past that I couldn’t install the generic ForceWare drivers on my laptop equipped Geforce FX 5200Go. Normally, you just have to wait for the manufacturer of your laptop to release specialized drivers for your video card. Well, being that I was having problems, I did not want to wait, and I decided to hack the video card drivers to try and install the latest ForceWare drivers. First, I extracted the contents of the downloaded ForceWare executable to a folder on my hard drive, and I proceeded to modify the INF file in that directory to include my graphics card. Well, so far… it seems to have worked! There’s no telling what kind of consequences hacking the driver to work could have later on down the road, however.

Now that I’ve wasted all this time on that, I’ll be a busy bee getting around to doing real work. Boooo! I’m sure nobody cares about my DivX troubles, but I just had to vent this frustration somewhere! I’ll try and make the next post more interesting.