I like to use Windows 2000 for Divx playback. The main advantage is that W2K
is more tolerant of bad frames than Windows 9x/ME. When W2K encounters a bad
frame, it muscles its way right through, whereas W9x will freeze the video
and continue the sound, requiring you to manually 'Fast-Forward' the movie
through the bad part. In addition, I fill my Divx disks to the maximum with
the movie, leaving no room for a launcher. I want my rips to be maximum
quality, and can't see wasting space on anything which is not actually the
movie.
In W9x, adding a 'autorun.inf' file with the following parameters works
fine:
But try the completed movie in W2K with this autorun.inf file, and you will
recieve a 'Access Denied' error. The problem seems to be that Windows 9x/Me
starts Media Player with its working folder set to the drive autorun.inf was
on, while Windows 2000 does not. So in turn Media Player tries to find the
file on the wrong drive.
I guess it has to do with the use of the "start" command. It is used because
mplayer2.exe is not by default in the PATH and only with "start" will
Windows search among the shell registered executables. So although mplayer2
will open in Windows 2000 using the simple autorun.inf file, it can't find
the movie since W2K does not default to the drive where the autorun.inf is
found.
A friend of mine attending a university in Hungary made an autorun.exe which
just does a ShellExecuteEx on the command line parameters you give it, with
the working folder set to where autorun.exe is located, ignoring the working
folder Windows passed to it. The executeable is only 2K, so it does not
affect the size of my movie projects :-)
Bottom line is this:
Make a 'autorun.inf' as before, but substitute the 'autorun.exe' for the
'start' command. File will look something like this...
Burn this to your Divx CD-R along with the movie and the autorun.exe file,
and you movies will autostart in both Windows 9x/ME as well as Windows 2000.
Note : Included in the download is the autorun.c file for those curious as to the
source code that the program uses. This is included for your information
only, and it is not necessary to add to your finished project for the
program to work.
Home
autorun_w2k.zip
