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Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
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Well, if there was such a thread like this before, I couldn't find it even with searching. So I just thought I'd make a nice handly little guide for many things video related. I know it's been done a million times before, but I'm trying to not only make it convenient here, but to also kind of put it all together. I'll keep useful links at the bottom and try to provide a link for every important program mentioned. This is long, so I tried to divide it out, but I wanted to be detailed to cover as much as I could. I hope this is useful to someone.
-- Watching --
CODECS:
Ok, first up is watching as this is most commonly done. As most of you already know, you need appropriate codecs installed to actually watch them. If any of you don't know, codec is short for encoder/decoder. These are files that tell the appropriate programs (for most of us, this is the windows filter system) how to actually work with video files. Usually in the form of a binary DLL file, but, sometimes as .ax and in a few cases something else. For those that don't have proper installers with them, you will occasionally find a .inf file with them, which all you have to do is right click and choose install. If you don't find the .inf file, you probably have to manually register the file itself. These are usually the ones that come as .ax. Go to a command prompt and find that directory, then type:
Replacing the filename with the real file name of course. The quotes are only necessary if there are spaces in the filename. Oh, and I believe in some older versions of windows (98 and 95 if I recall) it was regsvr rather than regsvr32. To uninstall the codec, merely type
later.
One thing many people do is get codec packs. Some will almost passionately insist you must use nimo or one of the few other good ones. However, I have found that you truly are better off without them if you are serious about watching a multitude of differently encoded videos. (*cough* anime fans *cough*) The reason being that even the best codec packs can still run into the occasional rare conflict and they will quite often have an older version of the codec. In some cases, only the very latest build will do. This is especially common with Xvid I've found. For some reason you will just run into any number of errors sometimes when playing a Xvid encoded video that was encoded with the very latest if your codec is outdated. The usual symptom was the video running slow and skipping like insane. Occasionally you get crashes instead. Of course, MOST of the time, you can install a codec pack and then just install the latest version of the appropriate codec afterwords, but this is much more likely to cause conflicts and it's extra work in the long run. One important thing to remember is that you should ONLY install the codecs you NEED. I can't emphasise enough how many problems are caused by conflicting codecs being installed improperly. This is becoming more and more common as MPEG4 becomes more popular and everything wants to take over decoding it. Oh, and it's best to restart after installing a codec. Sometimes (especially if switching the codec used for one particular thing) they won't work until you do.
On a similar note, I'd like to strongly recommend ffdshow-tryouts. I suspect not one will disagree with me on this. Ffdshow-tryouts is a nice little filtering program which can, in fact, decode quite a lot of things itself. You probably shouldn't use it for the things that change the most (as I mentioned Xvid earlier) but it will probably stay working with more standardized stuff such as the basics like Cinepak and Indeo and even a few newer things like DivX (at least, I haven't had troubles with it yet.) It's fully configurable at any time, so you can set it to not work with the stuff it shouldn't. However, here's where ffdshow-tryouts truly shines. It has some positively wonderful video filters (which can be used with videos ffdshow-tryouts isn't decoding by setting it to work with raw video in the codecs part of the settings.) You can resize, denoise, sharpen/blur, even ADD noise (adds a sort of film quality, not MPEG style artifacts.) Anime fans will find the effects of combining the denoise3d with a sharpen and bicubic/lanczos resize to have positively BEAUTIFUL effects. (Properly configured you can make some pretty noisy video look like DVD quality sometimes.) Of course, bear in mind that all this costs a lot of CPU power. Don't even try this on anything really slow though if you expect to do more than just resize with maybe a little denoising or something. Naturally with a slower CPU you can still do some nice stuff, merely you won't get to see how nice it can really look. I still got some nice resizing and minor filtering effects out of the 1.4 AMD TBird (ran at 1.6GHz) I used to have, but, now that I have this CPU I can get some really nice effects.
PLAYERS:
Here's a common field of debate. Everyone has a preference. Some people actually like microsoft's latest Windows Media Player, but most of us have hated it since version 7 when they began adding a lot of unnecessary bloat like skins/etc. Some people may not realize that they can run "mplayer2" and get Windows Media Player version 6.4, the last "good" version and many people love this version enough to still be using it. However, more recently there has been another made to resemble, but, improve on it named Media Player Classic. This player is becoming terribly popular, and not without good reason. It has built in support for many things including even splitting stuff like OGM and Matroska on it's own. This is more efficient than codecs sometimes. All the while, on the surface it looks just like the WMP6.4 we came to love for it's simplicity combined with funcionality. There are quite a number of other free players, many of which I fear I forget at times as my preference is clearly MPC. I know that many use ZoomPlayer, DivXPlayer, as well as several others. I'm sure someone would be glad to post their favorites as well as where to get them. Also, I used to use a completly unknown player called LightAlloy (created by someone in Russia) which was, unfortunately, commercial but still quite amazing with some built in video filters. Before Winamp5 (curiously more efficient than 3 if you get rid of unnecessary stuff like modern skins) I could only get MP3s to play smoothly on my laptop with LightAlloy. The author is working on a free clone of it for some reason however. I believe called TotalPlayer. Before LightAlloy, I used to use one called Sasami2k (not on the crappy laptop though, lots of CPU/ram needed) which was basically taking the WMP core and adding on some nice extras like filtering. Unfortunately, the project completely stagnated and last I checked they said that the project wasn't dead (this statement was issued YEARS ago, roughly '99 or so I think.) However, with the help of ffdshow-tryouts, you don't really need a player with built in video filters for the most part. For DVD playback, you may enjoy the fact that ZoomPlayer allows you to link in ffdshow-tryouts. There's nothing but troubles when you try to use some of the players intended for normal video on a DVD and, for some reason, most DVD players lack the functionality one enjoys from the normal players. You may have to try a bunch of them to find the one you TRULY like. More than anything else it's a matter of personal preference. Find the one that suits you best. Oh, and Linux users will usually want MPlayer (which, btw, has ports to other oses -- including Windows -- these days) which is quite the capable player with support for a few good video filters.
-- Editing and Encoding--
In the past, Windows users used VirtualDub for most AVI editing as well as adding video filters since it supported frameserver before hardly anything else. Also, tmpgenc was commonly used for mpeg editing though often one had to go through VirtualDub for the best video filtering. However, more recently, a lovely program called AVISynth has been created. This program was made explicitly for frameserving and you can add any number of filters with support even for VirtualDub filters (though most of those that come with it are more than sufficient.) Using it, we don't really need seperate editing programs for most of the filtering work, merely the heavy editing stuff and the actual encoding. The downside of AVISynth is that you must learn to write scripts for working with the videos. However, this isn't usually too bad. The information on doing this is well documented as well as great syntax lists and descriptions of the filters and tutorials. For anyone really programming handicapped, just get up a good universal script and all you should have to change is the filename and minor modifications here and there. VirtualDub is still probably the best choice for AVI encoding, but many people prefer to use alternate encoders instead of tmpgenc since tmpgenc is officially commercial software (though in truth, the main things that make the free version different is limited MPEG2 encoding and that sort of thing, but this isn't their fault since they have to pay some expensive licensing fees really as I understand it. MPEG1 functionality is completly unlimited as you VCD makers might be happy to know.) Last I checked, bbMPEG was probably the most commonly used free MPEG encoder.
For the less experienced, you will want to check videohelp's website (link below) for some very detailed specifications as well as tutorials when working with everything from VCD to DVD. Of course, when it comes to producing AVI files, there aren't any DEFINITIVE standards yet (though, SUPPOSEDLY, the DivX people are pushing for this -- I haven't seen any specs yet though.) For AVI, you can, more or less, just do what you want when it comes to things such as bitrates, codecs, etc. However, you do want to try to keep things reasonable. For the codec, you should commonly encode your final videos in a MPEG4 format. Preferably DivX or Xvid as these are the most common and the most likely that you can count on having or that whoever the encode is for will have (I won't get into legalities, there are legitimate things such as making a backup you can rely on actually having the codec for in a year or if you made your own videos you wish to share or something like that.) However, if you are going to encode more than once, I simply can't emphasize the importance of using a lossless codec if at all physically possible. (Lossless takes a LOT of space unfortunately.) Huffyuv was the best for this the last I checked. I believe there is a FLAC ACM codec for windows now, so you might be able to encode the audio with that as well. Don't forget and use a lossy codec like MP3 for audio in each video. (If the original was a common lossy codec like MP3, you might want to simply demux the audio and remux it into your new video if you haven't changed any timings or anything. This way it isn't reencoded with quality loss. Despite what the commercial applications try to convince you of, you CANNOT reencode a lossy format without loosing quality. Usually they try to add a filter to remove the artifacts, but, with every reencode, data is lost regardless of filters -- and filters just make more data loss occur. There are quite a few free tools for this.) Also, if you intend to do any captures, a lossless codec will usually require less CPU power, leaving more leeway to avoid frameloss. Of course, with a capture, lossless is important since you will have to reencode if you don't intend to burn to a whole bunch of discs or something. If you must use lossy, a properly configured MJPEG can have pretty tolerable quality versus low CPU usage, though inevitably more will be lost when you reencode (it's still quite large.) Even if your CPU can somehow handle it, it's not recommended that you use something like Xvid or Divx for video captures, because both of those have the lovely ability to do 2-pass VBR, which is just not going to work in a capture.
Oh, and for anyone serious about backup up their DVDs to CDR or DVD-R in the case of DL DVDs for those of us without DL burners, you will find quite a number of commercial applications that are made to help you make backups. These programs do have the advantage of making everything nice and simple for you, but if you truly care about quality, you will find that manually doing such things simply can't be beaten -- albiet at the cost of a LOT more work and a good deal more time. You will have to rip the files off the dvd and decrypt them, which I'm not going to go into details in as it upsets a lot of people (though you still legally have the right to back up whatever you legally own, just not to give away those backups.) Once you have them decrypted, you can use this stuff to help you reencode them. You might try some of the tools on doom9 as I think that one or two might actually use the real tools instead of having a bunch of cheap crap built in like most of the commercial applications.
Well, I hope all this can help SOMEONE.
Alright, here are the links I promised (in no order whatsoever):
http://www.doom9.org/ - Also www.doom9.net - This site has a wonderful collection of most of all the video tools you might need. They seem to stay up to date pretty well, but you still can't beat going to the actual homepage for the respective software you want when you can find them as this way you are sure you get the latest and see news as well as other tools by the same people not always mentioned on doom9.
http://www.videohelp.com - Formerly just vcdhelp.com but, after also being dvdrhelp.com in addition, they decided to make videohelp.com to show they are more general purpose. They have VERY useful and detailed information on the nature of the standards from VCD up to DVD. They also have tutorials, a host of tools, and keep up a compatibility list so you know if the player you want to buy can play SVCD or something like that.
http://ffdshow-tryouts.sf.net/ - Wonderful video filter codec for windows. Can have positively beautiful results (or ugly crap if you really wanted.) d-:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ - "The Movie Player" -- formerly "The Movie Player For Linux" - Great player, and about the only thing worth using in Linux for videos IMO. Their server was down the other day, so I'll list their sourceforge host, just in case: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer/
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ - Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a modification of Media Player Classic to bring it more up to date in several things. It also now has fixes for video tearing and etc with modern systems.
http://members.cox.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html - The bbMPEG homepage. If you don't want to encode MPEG with TMPGenc.
http://www.tmpgenc.com/ - Alternately, http://www.tmpgenc.net/ for a less direct way. The TMPGEnc homepage. http://www.pegasys-inc.com/ is the site of the people who make it.
http://www.avisynth.org/ - Powerful scripting frameserver capable of applying filters/etc so you don't have to go through 50 applications to do minor things. Also, can sometimes be used to provide functionality for a few formats that aren't supported in a particular applications.
http://www.virtualdub.org/ - Alternately, http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub The greatest FREE AVI encoder there is IMO. Well...
http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/ - Excellent modification of VirtualDub to support MKV and OGM among other things with support for multiple audio streams and etc. Sadly, it's very very out of date now. They have not bothered to create any newer versions at all and the real VirtualDub has gone leaps and bounds ahead of this old version. That said, it is very handy for a lot of very quick tasks such as muxing/demuxing, changing order of streams and etc. This can all be done with external tools, but it's often easier this way.
EDIT: I no longer really maintain this thread (though obviously there's no reason people can't still post in it and maintain it better than I could anyway.) I will state that ffdshow-tryouts has turned out to be an excellent project lately now and I would strongly recommend it as probably the best choice out there for dealing with codecs (I even find it can manage H.264 surprisingly well on an EeePC 701 -- aka the older 4G model before these newer ones which has a 630MHz Pentium-M based chip running on a factory underclocked FSB so while impressive for its speed it won't break any performance records.)
-- Watching --
CODECS:
Ok, first up is watching as this is most commonly done. As most of you already know, you need appropriate codecs installed to actually watch them. If any of you don't know, codec is short for encoder/decoder. These are files that tell the appropriate programs (for most of us, this is the windows filter system) how to actually work with video files. Usually in the form of a binary DLL file, but, sometimes as .ax and in a few cases something else. For those that don't have proper installers with them, you will occasionally find a .inf file with them, which all you have to do is right click and choose install. If you don't find the .inf file, you probably have to manually register the file itself. These are usually the ones that come as .ax. Go to a command prompt and find that directory, then type:
Code:
regsvr32 "file name.ax"
Code:
regsvr32 /u "file name.ax"One thing many people do is get codec packs. Some will almost passionately insist you must use nimo or one of the few other good ones. However, I have found that you truly are better off without them if you are serious about watching a multitude of differently encoded videos. (*cough* anime fans *cough*) The reason being that even the best codec packs can still run into the occasional rare conflict and they will quite often have an older version of the codec. In some cases, only the very latest build will do. This is especially common with Xvid I've found. For some reason you will just run into any number of errors sometimes when playing a Xvid encoded video that was encoded with the very latest if your codec is outdated. The usual symptom was the video running slow and skipping like insane. Occasionally you get crashes instead. Of course, MOST of the time, you can install a codec pack and then just install the latest version of the appropriate codec afterwords, but this is much more likely to cause conflicts and it's extra work in the long run. One important thing to remember is that you should ONLY install the codecs you NEED. I can't emphasise enough how many problems are caused by conflicting codecs being installed improperly. This is becoming more and more common as MPEG4 becomes more popular and everything wants to take over decoding it. Oh, and it's best to restart after installing a codec. Sometimes (especially if switching the codec used for one particular thing) they won't work until you do.
On a similar note, I'd like to strongly recommend ffdshow-tryouts. I suspect not one will disagree with me on this. Ffdshow-tryouts is a nice little filtering program which can, in fact, decode quite a lot of things itself. You probably shouldn't use it for the things that change the most (as I mentioned Xvid earlier) but it will probably stay working with more standardized stuff such as the basics like Cinepak and Indeo and even a few newer things like DivX (at least, I haven't had troubles with it yet.) It's fully configurable at any time, so you can set it to not work with the stuff it shouldn't. However, here's where ffdshow-tryouts truly shines. It has some positively wonderful video filters (which can be used with videos ffdshow-tryouts isn't decoding by setting it to work with raw video in the codecs part of the settings.) You can resize, denoise, sharpen/blur, even ADD noise (adds a sort of film quality, not MPEG style artifacts.) Anime fans will find the effects of combining the denoise3d with a sharpen and bicubic/lanczos resize to have positively BEAUTIFUL effects. (Properly configured you can make some pretty noisy video look like DVD quality sometimes.) Of course, bear in mind that all this costs a lot of CPU power. Don't even try this on anything really slow though if you expect to do more than just resize with maybe a little denoising or something. Naturally with a slower CPU you can still do some nice stuff, merely you won't get to see how nice it can really look. I still got some nice resizing and minor filtering effects out of the 1.4 AMD TBird (ran at 1.6GHz) I used to have, but, now that I have this CPU I can get some really nice effects.
PLAYERS:
Here's a common field of debate. Everyone has a preference. Some people actually like microsoft's latest Windows Media Player, but most of us have hated it since version 7 when they began adding a lot of unnecessary bloat like skins/etc. Some people may not realize that they can run "mplayer2" and get Windows Media Player version 6.4, the last "good" version and many people love this version enough to still be using it. However, more recently there has been another made to resemble, but, improve on it named Media Player Classic. This player is becoming terribly popular, and not without good reason. It has built in support for many things including even splitting stuff like OGM and Matroska on it's own. This is more efficient than codecs sometimes. All the while, on the surface it looks just like the WMP6.4 we came to love for it's simplicity combined with funcionality. There are quite a number of other free players, many of which I fear I forget at times as my preference is clearly MPC. I know that many use ZoomPlayer, DivXPlayer, as well as several others. I'm sure someone would be glad to post their favorites as well as where to get them. Also, I used to use a completly unknown player called LightAlloy (created by someone in Russia) which was, unfortunately, commercial but still quite amazing with some built in video filters. Before Winamp5 (curiously more efficient than 3 if you get rid of unnecessary stuff like modern skins) I could only get MP3s to play smoothly on my laptop with LightAlloy. The author is working on a free clone of it for some reason however. I believe called TotalPlayer. Before LightAlloy, I used to use one called Sasami2k (not on the crappy laptop though, lots of CPU/ram needed) which was basically taking the WMP core and adding on some nice extras like filtering. Unfortunately, the project completely stagnated and last I checked they said that the project wasn't dead (this statement was issued YEARS ago, roughly '99 or so I think.) However, with the help of ffdshow-tryouts, you don't really need a player with built in video filters for the most part. For DVD playback, you may enjoy the fact that ZoomPlayer allows you to link in ffdshow-tryouts. There's nothing but troubles when you try to use some of the players intended for normal video on a DVD and, for some reason, most DVD players lack the functionality one enjoys from the normal players. You may have to try a bunch of them to find the one you TRULY like. More than anything else it's a matter of personal preference. Find the one that suits you best. Oh, and Linux users will usually want MPlayer (which, btw, has ports to other oses -- including Windows -- these days) which is quite the capable player with support for a few good video filters.
-- Editing and Encoding--
In the past, Windows users used VirtualDub for most AVI editing as well as adding video filters since it supported frameserver before hardly anything else. Also, tmpgenc was commonly used for mpeg editing though often one had to go through VirtualDub for the best video filtering. However, more recently, a lovely program called AVISynth has been created. This program was made explicitly for frameserving and you can add any number of filters with support even for VirtualDub filters (though most of those that come with it are more than sufficient.) Using it, we don't really need seperate editing programs for most of the filtering work, merely the heavy editing stuff and the actual encoding. The downside of AVISynth is that you must learn to write scripts for working with the videos. However, this isn't usually too bad. The information on doing this is well documented as well as great syntax lists and descriptions of the filters and tutorials. For anyone really programming handicapped, just get up a good universal script and all you should have to change is the filename and minor modifications here and there. VirtualDub is still probably the best choice for AVI encoding, but many people prefer to use alternate encoders instead of tmpgenc since tmpgenc is officially commercial software (though in truth, the main things that make the free version different is limited MPEG2 encoding and that sort of thing, but this isn't their fault since they have to pay some expensive licensing fees really as I understand it. MPEG1 functionality is completly unlimited as you VCD makers might be happy to know.) Last I checked, bbMPEG was probably the most commonly used free MPEG encoder.
For the less experienced, you will want to check videohelp's website (link below) for some very detailed specifications as well as tutorials when working with everything from VCD to DVD. Of course, when it comes to producing AVI files, there aren't any DEFINITIVE standards yet (though, SUPPOSEDLY, the DivX people are pushing for this -- I haven't seen any specs yet though.) For AVI, you can, more or less, just do what you want when it comes to things such as bitrates, codecs, etc. However, you do want to try to keep things reasonable. For the codec, you should commonly encode your final videos in a MPEG4 format. Preferably DivX or Xvid as these are the most common and the most likely that you can count on having or that whoever the encode is for will have (I won't get into legalities, there are legitimate things such as making a backup you can rely on actually having the codec for in a year or if you made your own videos you wish to share or something like that.) However, if you are going to encode more than once, I simply can't emphasize the importance of using a lossless codec if at all physically possible. (Lossless takes a LOT of space unfortunately.) Huffyuv was the best for this the last I checked. I believe there is a FLAC ACM codec for windows now, so you might be able to encode the audio with that as well. Don't forget and use a lossy codec like MP3 for audio in each video. (If the original was a common lossy codec like MP3, you might want to simply demux the audio and remux it into your new video if you haven't changed any timings or anything. This way it isn't reencoded with quality loss. Despite what the commercial applications try to convince you of, you CANNOT reencode a lossy format without loosing quality. Usually they try to add a filter to remove the artifacts, but, with every reencode, data is lost regardless of filters -- and filters just make more data loss occur. There are quite a few free tools for this.) Also, if you intend to do any captures, a lossless codec will usually require less CPU power, leaving more leeway to avoid frameloss. Of course, with a capture, lossless is important since you will have to reencode if you don't intend to burn to a whole bunch of discs or something. If you must use lossy, a properly configured MJPEG can have pretty tolerable quality versus low CPU usage, though inevitably more will be lost when you reencode (it's still quite large.) Even if your CPU can somehow handle it, it's not recommended that you use something like Xvid or Divx for video captures, because both of those have the lovely ability to do 2-pass VBR, which is just not going to work in a capture.
Oh, and for anyone serious about backup up their DVDs to CDR or DVD-R in the case of DL DVDs for those of us without DL burners, you will find quite a number of commercial applications that are made to help you make backups. These programs do have the advantage of making everything nice and simple for you, but if you truly care about quality, you will find that manually doing such things simply can't be beaten -- albiet at the cost of a LOT more work and a good deal more time. You will have to rip the files off the dvd and decrypt them, which I'm not going to go into details in as it upsets a lot of people (though you still legally have the right to back up whatever you legally own, just not to give away those backups.) Once you have them decrypted, you can use this stuff to help you reencode them. You might try some of the tools on doom9 as I think that one or two might actually use the real tools instead of having a bunch of cheap crap built in like most of the commercial applications.
Well, I hope all this can help SOMEONE.
Alright, here are the links I promised (in no order whatsoever):
http://www.doom9.org/ - Also www.doom9.net - This site has a wonderful collection of most of all the video tools you might need. They seem to stay up to date pretty well, but you still can't beat going to the actual homepage for the respective software you want when you can find them as this way you are sure you get the latest and see news as well as other tools by the same people not always mentioned on doom9.
http://www.videohelp.com - Formerly just vcdhelp.com but, after also being dvdrhelp.com in addition, they decided to make videohelp.com to show they are more general purpose. They have VERY useful and detailed information on the nature of the standards from VCD up to DVD. They also have tutorials, a host of tools, and keep up a compatibility list so you know if the player you want to buy can play SVCD or something like that.
http://ffdshow-tryouts.sf.net/ - Wonderful video filter codec for windows. Can have positively beautiful results (or ugly crap if you really wanted.) d-:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ - "The Movie Player" -- formerly "The Movie Player For Linux" - Great player, and about the only thing worth using in Linux for videos IMO. Their server was down the other day, so I'll list their sourceforge host, just in case: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer/
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ - Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a modification of Media Player Classic to bring it more up to date in several things. It also now has fixes for video tearing and etc with modern systems.
http://members.cox.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html - The bbMPEG homepage. If you don't want to encode MPEG with TMPGenc.
http://www.tmpgenc.com/ - Alternately, http://www.tmpgenc.net/ for a less direct way. The TMPGEnc homepage. http://www.pegasys-inc.com/ is the site of the people who make it.
http://www.avisynth.org/ - Powerful scripting frameserver capable of applying filters/etc so you don't have to go through 50 applications to do minor things. Also, can sometimes be used to provide functionality for a few formats that aren't supported in a particular applications.
http://www.virtualdub.org/ - Alternately, http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub The greatest FREE AVI encoder there is IMO. Well...
http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/ - Excellent modification of VirtualDub to support MKV and OGM among other things with support for multiple audio streams and etc. Sadly, it's very very out of date now. They have not bothered to create any newer versions at all and the real VirtualDub has gone leaps and bounds ahead of this old version. That said, it is very handy for a lot of very quick tasks such as muxing/demuxing, changing order of streams and etc. This can all be done with external tools, but it's often easier this way.
EDIT: I no longer really maintain this thread (though obviously there's no reason people can't still post in it and maintain it better than I could anyway.) I will state that ffdshow-tryouts has turned out to be an excellent project lately now and I would strongly recommend it as probably the best choice out there for dealing with codecs (I even find it can manage H.264 surprisingly well on an EeePC 701 -- aka the older 4G model before these newer ones which has a 630MHz Pentium-M based chip running on a factory underclocked FSB so while impressive for its speed it won't break any performance records.)
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