plain text movie files

Hi everyone

I have an old tv program that is in a plain text file format and will play using VLC (though nothing else), but would like to be able to convert it to, say, Divx, to be able to view it on my television, there being nothing quite like the comfort of my own armchair!

Is at all possible to change the format ? I don't seem to be able to find anybody with a similar problem, or any possible solution.

I can convert it to play on my ipod using Handbrake, but thats as far as I can go.

Can any body help ?

Thanks
mattahula

While we're waiting for the spammer to show up...

1. There is no such animal as a plain text file format that will run as a video.
2. What Mac/PC do you have?
3. What Operating System and version are you using?
4. What is the real format of the video file - can be found by doing a Get Info of the file in OS X
5. If you have already converted it to be playable on your iPod, you already have a version that will play on your TV when connecting your Mac or your iPod to it.

I have an imac 2.66ghz core 2 duo, operating on OSX V 10.5.4 Leopard.

If I go into finder, highlight the file and 'Get info' on it, the file Kind is Plain Text. If I try to burn it as anything on Toast, for example, it says it is an unsupported format and cannot be copied.

If I double click on the file in finder it says the movie could not be opened - the file is not a movie file. However if I open VLC and browse and select that same file it plays as a movie.

If i try to convert the ipod file to avi using handbrake the program keeps crashing. If I try to copy the ipod file with toast if plays as a extremely visually distorted file with perfect audio.

As you can probably tell, I'm pretty new to the world of the mac and am probably doing a few stupid things, but know no different!

Plain text is what OS X calls a regular old .txt file. This is not a media file container. If you are indeed opening and playing this file with VLC, don't have a clue what's been done to this file, nor what type of file it really might be. Am surprised it doesn't just crash like all the other apps.

If your operating system sees it as a text file, it's named wrong. What is the file extension (i.e. *.m3u, *.txt, *.avi)? You should see what VLC sees it as - open in VLC, go to Media Information (⌘+I), and see what it says under Codecs.

Under Codec Details it lists Stream 0 as XVID Type Video and Stream 1 as mpga type Audio.

Does this shed light on why I can't burn to a dvd ?

I guess more importantly is why my machine recognizes it as a Plain text file !?

mattahula said:

Under Codec Details it lists Stream 0 as XVID Type Video and Stream 1 as mpga type Audio.

Does this shed light on why I can't burn to a dvd ?

I guess more importantly is why my machine recognizes it as a Plain text file !?

Click to expand...

It's most likely an AVI if the video stream is XVID (not sure if XVID has its own container). If you want to burn it to DVD, you need burning software that can decode XVID video and MPEG audio (probably MP3) - there is a free program for windows called DVD Flick created specifically for the purpose of burning movies to DVD (supports many formats), but I don't know of any for Mac OS that aren't shareware. Hard to say why your OS thinks it's a text file, but you should rename it to *.avi since that's probably what it is.

I will try and find some (hopefully) free software to try and burn the formats as you suggested.

Thanks for your help help guys, most appreciated - I'm realising that it will be a slow process trying to build up my knowledge on all things mac!

Some FLV files without an extension will show up as Plain Text. The ones I have run into are get_video with no extension. They are not plain text but FLV (Flash Video) Files. VLC will play them as is. To get Quicktime to play then just add the .FLV extension providing you have Perian installed on your Mac.

Like was said there are no video files that are text files.

dtravis7 said:

Some FLV files without an extension will show up as Plain Text. The ones I have run into are get_video with no extension. They are not plain text but FLV (Flash Video) Files. VLC will play them as is. To get Quicktime to play then just add the .FLV extension providing you have Perian installed on your Mac.

Click to expand...

I think the get_video files were from older versions of DownloadHelper. Newer versions will save with the file extension, and can also save MP4 video if it's available on YouTube, Google Video, whatever, etc.

this is really great.i searched this many times.thanks alot for the info