Based on my months of practice trying to get windows movie maker with video files having .avi extension and codec xvid, I have given up.

Yes, you can try vlcplayer, download the xvid codec from xvid.org and play videos, but even when everthing looks okay, your movie maker will crash blaming the xvid team.

Solution ? Download xvid compiled by other users that will work on Vista and its other versions. Well, that also doesn’t work either. As you run out of time, you will be installing and uninstalling xvid condecs from lots of sources and some even are just spyware and adware that will further ruine your PC. Solution? say good bye to xvid if you have VISTA or ask Microsoft to do something about it.

Why would Microsoft even try to listen to you when xvid is an open source, MS has no control over it.

The compiled xvid on xvid.org site is also very old perhaps that might be the reason it fails to work on latest OS such as VISTA. Unless the team of xvid tweaks it to work perfeclty for VISTA, you are out of luck! Also it does seem that the team of xvid now decided to go commercial so they somone how take you to DIVX site. I had this experience, you ? This was from their site www.xvid.org

Solution is simple. Do not use Microsoft’s movie maker but instead buy other moving making software. Buy a converter that converts your .avi files to .mov with encoding set to mpeg4 or H.264

Done!

Apple’s Quicktime can be downloaded from their website. With extra 30 bucks or so you get the pro version which allows you to trim and cut parts of the video and also allows you to encode for the web or for any other purposes such as DVD quality.

Many of the old camcorders used xvid codecs, it is open source and it worked perfectly until VISTA came to our door. All those companies now have made their old camcorders obsolute, i.e. to say mave made new ones with at least mpeg4 codec or H.264.

If you are having problems making movies in VISTA with your old camcorder and you don’t want to buy any new camcorders, the best you can do is to try DIVX for around $20 which also does come with bugs and craps that we hear all over the Internet, or try getting a video converter. There are many shareware which allows youto convert upto 5 minutes for free. I personally like products made by this company, check if they have any shareware versions; http://www.imtoo.com/

For movie encoding try Virtualdub, a free open source program that works better than the rest! Takes a while for you to get used to it, but once you get the hang of it, you will love this software.

So, what does all this mean ? Many people are frustrated with xvid and vista and are buying new camcorders or softwares just to convert them so they can share their videos on the internet such as youtube.com or google videos. Everytime you convert your source video to another format, you are losing quality.

Solution? How much time do you have to convert, find solutions. If not, get hold of a new camcorder that records in MPEG4 or H.264, and the rest should be easy to follow.

Any questions, comment and I will try my best to respond as soon as I can.

Happy Video Watching or Movie Making To you!