“I have this friend, he downloaded The Simpsons Season xx complete”
These are encoded with a special codec called vp7 developed by on2 technologies..
They don’t seem to like mac world. and they don’t intend to dev any mac version of this codec…even if they keep shouting everywhere: “it’s the best codec of the world!!” (capitalist logic -_-’)

2 solutions:

• staring at a windows machine with right codecs and a player.
• downloading mplayer for Os Xwhich is vp7 enabled.

Obviously I am a maniac and i prefer “my fiend” to have a good old avi file running in VLC on the mac
So…. Googling!!!

Solution found: vmware for a linux distro, (tried with the osx mencoder, wouldn’t work because of missing codecs..)
now in linux: install mencoder, and w32codecs

once all this is made, just run this bash script in the movies container.

#! /bin/bash
echo "hello"
for a in *VP7*.avi; do
  outFile=`e cho $a | sed 's/.DVDRIP.VP7.KEGGERMAN//g'`
  mencoder $a -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o /dev/null && \
  mencoder $a -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=950 -o /home/ame235/converted/$outFile
done

makes conversion to XVid/mp3 and then renames the files, storing them to : /home/ame235/converted/

mod the bash according to your desires (notice the space on the word “echo”, couldn’t post without it but has to be removed!).. It took about 2 times (we’re doing a 2 pass job for better quality) 6 mins per file on my vmware ubuntu o a McBkPro: 15mins per file approx.

if you have a dedicated machine instead of the wmware, use it!!