Techie Geniuses, I need you help...!!!

drunknmunky

afternoon gents, I have a bit of a problem...

I've downloaded a few episodes of an old tv show that isnt available on dvd, but when i try watch them the audio runs faster than the images, i.e. a character is speaking, but the videos lagging behind, i'm still seeing the intro...

Now.. bearing in mind my comp isnt the greatest - pII 800, 128Mb RAM, 20 Gb hard drive, i'm watching this on realplayer. so my questions to you are....

1. should i use another program to watch them on instead of realplayer? (they're avi files but wont play on quicktime for some reason). If so, which program would you recommend?

2. Should I buy a dvd player/writer for my PC, burn the episodes onto a dvd, and watch them on the PC while they're playing in the dvd player or...

3. Give up and just buy another PC as this one is just way too slow to watch the epsiodes on?

Your advise is much appreaicted...
Many thanks,
Munky

wolfman

It's nothing related to your computer. It sounds like a bad encoding where the audio isn't sync'd with the video.

I've not done it, but I think VLC (google it) is a media player capable of "off-setting" the audio so that it sync's with the video.

You shouldn't need a new PC or dvd player. It's related to the actually video file. Try VLC and off-setting the audio, I'll google about see if I kind find any tutorials.

meclive

It could be a number of things.

e.g.
1. You might not have the correct codec to playback the file.
2. Try VLC Media Player as it plays just about anything.
3. The file has just been made like that so you will need to split the audio and video and re-encode them together for it to play correctly.

wolfman

Here you go, how to off-set the audio with VLC:
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/16069

nickmack

If they're not dodgy copies from somewhere then I would say it could be your PC. Often audio and video can become unsynchronised on playback if the computer cannot process the information fast enough.