aMule Forum
English => aMule Help => Topic started by: kikidik on January 09, 2007, 09:15:56 AM
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Hi,
I have major problems with previewing my temporary downloaded files. I've followed the instructions how to activate video player on "Directories" page but I always get in my temporary files folder some strange format files that cannot be opened !? Why is that? I use other sharing programs and my downloaded files are automatically in original format.
I'm on Mac OS X last version, PowerPC, iMacG5 isight. Thanks
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yes, me too
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In order to be able to preview files you have to have downloaded the first chunk (9.28MB part of the file)which contains all relevant information about the file. (Maybe the last one is needed too, I'm not sure)
There's an option in the preferences to 'download the first chunk first' or something like this.
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During a download you get a 0xy.part file, which is just a place holder for all the bits that have come in. Most video players will not automatically play these files because they lack the proper extension, such as .AVI or .MPG. If there is enough information in the file though the player can play it, you will have to force it by specifically telling it to open this file.
Once the download is complete the file will be renamed to the original filename and moved to the Incoming directory.
But, like I said, the file needs to have enough information in it to even be played by any video player. For MPEG files this information needs to be in the first bytes, every frame of an MPEG file contains all necessary information to play it. So you just need enough bytes in a row to play something.
For AVI files this is different, all the information about the file layout is in the last bytes of the file, so you need to download not only the first bytes where the actual video and/or audio data is, but also the last bytes where all the synchronisation pointers are. This is why most p2p application have this option to "download first and last chunks first".
Anyway, to get back to your original question: If you have a videoplayer installed that generally works, this should work for aMule as well. If the file does play with a message like "unknown format" or "unknown codec" there simply is not enough information downloaded to actually be able to play even the first seconds of the video.
Patience is the best solution here.
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Thanks very much on your exhaustive response.
It’s exactly what I wanted to know. The only inconvenient thing about this is that you can’t check up immediately the quality and the real content of downloaded file. Once they’re finished they work perfectly well.
By the way, I was obliged to give up of using aMule because it definitely does not work well on my Mac. It stuck very often and captures all my working memory (!?). Several times I had to cut off the power to get it unblocked. I checked all setups (I think so) and I can’t find the reason why. I have 1GB of memory and till this moment such thing never happened.... The moment I stopped using aMule everything become fine like before.
Acquisition and Limewire work perfectly well but the choice of available files is remarkably worst...
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kikidik,
Are you using a BOINC client on your Mac? aMule is known not to work well when BOINC is running. We don't know exactly why. aMule is very sensitive to other processes which use a lot of CPU.