Determining AVI type?

[George Hincapie]

I have a Panasonic Blu-Ray player which will accept USB devices so I can watch movies on our TV. I have some .avis it will play without issue. I also have some .mkv files I have converted to .avi (because .mkv is not a supported file type), but I can't get them to play. I've tried 3 different encoding types and also tried divx conversion which the player supposedly supports, but still can get it to work.

Is there anything I can use to examine the .avi files that will play that will tell me what encoding type has been used so that I can replicate it?

We're going to buy a WDTV next month, but in the interim I need to get this sorted.

TIA.

 

[George Hincapie]

Use mediainfo to see what codecs they use. http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

.avi and .mkv are just container extensions they are not actual codecs. codecs are, xvid, divx, x264, mpeg2/4 and so on. You could have two videos one being xvid and one being mpeg 2 but they both have the .avi extension, as an example.

Thanks Groen. I think the .mkv files are x264 judging by the file names, but the .avi files that play have no such indication so I'll run those through Media Info.

Once I've got that information, what conversion app would be best to change it to the playable format?