Today, I was processing something in the background while I slept. I’m pretty much in bed for most of today and I will be for most of tomorrow. I was trying to convert a movie that I enjoy, called “Vampire Hunter D”, from one AVI format to another. The original avi format was called DIV3 or MP43. This is Microsoft’s hacked-around version of MPEG4 video + MP3 audio for low-motion videos. Most animes can fall under this category, I think. However, the Microsoft DIV3/MP43 format is so old and screwy that it’s almost impossible to find something to decode it correctly.

You can know the format for .avi files (maybe other movies, I don’t know) by something called a FourCC code. In order to change this movie from one format to another, the best way with the most options that I have found is to first install codecs (I used Nimo Codec Pack) for compressing/decompressing the movies. Then, take a program such as VirtualDub(1.6.3 at the time of this writing) to change from one format to another.

Inside of VitualDub, when you go to open a file, there is a setting to show advanced options for that file. Check the first “force FOURCC box” and type “MPV3” into it. This will make it so that VirtualDub reads the video as a different format, basically the same as DIV3, and will let you re-encode it as a different AVI format.

This is not my end goal, though. After changing it to an AVI with uncompressed PCM as the sound format, keeping the same video stream, I’m going to code the AVI into MPEG1 format for viewing on our home theater.

To do this, I’m using TMPGEnc. An excellent program, it lets you set all kinds of things in regards to MPEG files.

Where does SSE come into all of this? Well, while doing research to find appropriate converters for the old-format AVI file, I came across something called “ffdshow”. It had a regular version, an SSE version, and an SSE2 version. With this new computer and new processor, I can now use things with SSE2, where before I couldn’t even use regular SSE.

What is SSE?

The Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) were introduced in the Pentium III processor. The SSE extensions consist of a new set of instructions and a new set of registers. These instructions and registers are designed to allow Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) computations to be made on single-precision floating-point numbers.

Click here to find out more.