Packed Bitstream Avi files

[WalterK]

So i just ran into the my first packed bitstream avi file and for a moment i thought my system was lacking in CPU power as it was a Hidef Divx music video mplayer complained from the terminal that the system may not have had the amount of cpu power required and it zoomed right through the vid playing it at a very fast rate.
It bought ffmpeg to its knees on playback in ffplay something i had never encountered before with jerky playback and out of sync audio.
Luckily i decided to use avidemux to create a plain avi file and avidemux warned me the file contained a packed bitstream (I was planning on transcoding to plain mpeg4 to see if that would solve the problem), prior to this i had never run into one of these files.
So my question is , do i need to update mplayer or ffmpeg etc to their latest svn to avoid any more weird playbacks when the file in question is a packed bitstream?
Or do i have to bite the bullet and upgrade hardware to avoid this problem.
I just don't want to have to be using avidemux everytime i encounter one of these files to make them "clean" for linux playback.

[akupenguin]

Packed bitstream does not require any more cpu than non-packed. There must be something else wrong with that file.

[WalterK]

Yes something was wrong with the file.
I should pay more attention to the errors mplayer and ffplay give from the terminal, i just used their frontends so i didn't see the errors
On windows it plays back with no error.
But according to mplayer and ffplay its a badly interleaved avi file and required me in mplayer to use -forceidx and -ni to get it to playback.
Turns out it was not the packed bitstream that was causing the trouble.
It's a badly encoded divx6 file or at least one that is not standard.
I guess once it can be played back in windows without any problems thats all that matters to the person encoding.

[shevegen]

"I guess once it can be played back in windows without any problems thats all that matters to the person encoding."

Very true.

Even moreso i saw people just using the default Windows encoding stuff, and many of them never bothered to look for alternatives.

The advent of .wmv files all over the world :)

[kypec]

The advent of .wmv files all over the world :)
That last sentence scared out hell of me :eek::eek::eek: