14 DAY TRIAL // Mmmm, previewing
For the avid downloader out there, prepare yourself for a dream come true. You no longer have to wait for your downloads to be 100% complete before you can start watching them. For some of you this may come as a Godsend, for others, you might not give a hoot.
For the typical downloader, you might spend a good week downloading a specific file, eagerly anticipating the media inside (could be a movie or a game trailer), and when you finally do get your hands on it, you discover it's an old episode of Barney that some attention craving fourteen year old put out there and renamed it "Superman Returns Trailer."
There are people out there that do contrive their enjoyment from the misery of others. If you haven't learned this fact of life yet, prepare yourself for disappointment. The long and short of AVIPreview is that it works, but I wouldn't recommend it as your primary player.
What AVIPreview has to offer
First of all, I had a few problems with AVIPreviewer. The first is that I was only able to play about six seconds of my partially downloaded .AVI file. I was looking through the readme folder and realized that it didn't support the XVID FFDSHOW decoder. So I thought that this was my problem, but after an FFDSHOW uninstall, I still had problems playing partially downloaded media files.
The screen turned out to be really grainy whenever I was playing something through AVIPreview. I tried a few different movies as well but I still came up with the same result. As for the whole interface, one could say the program needs a definite upgrade. How old is version 0.26? It's got to be at least three years old by now.
After a while of playing around with the program, I thought that maybe there were a few things wrong with my files. So I tested them out in a few other players and I realized that my Windows Media Player now played everything at half speed. After a few minutes of laughing at super slowed down voices, I became somewhat annoyed that I now had to deal with another problem - of trying to reset my settings.
If you really can't live without a media previewer, you should try Media Player Classic, which plays incomplete .AVI filetypes. For those of you who don't like Media Player Classic, then give VLC a try, it's one of the most widely used partial download previewers on the net today.
The Good
Well, it does offer you a chance to preview your unfinished downloads, but at a price. It's good for quick previewing most of your downloaded media (AVI, divX, MPG, MPEG and VCD).
The Bad
Well, AVIPreview is just outdated. About two or three years ago, this would still be a program most people would want to have even with all these bugs, but now users aren't settling for it. It's very grainy when you view it , and it only played the first six seconds for me before skipping to the end (for every file I tried watching). The support is no longer working and the Web site doesn't seem to actually belong to AVIPreview anymore.
The Truth
I'll repeat myself just in case you guys hadn't caught on by now. Media Player Classic or VLC can do what AVIPreview does without all the bugs. If you don't need anything special, use AVIPreview because it does get the job done and you can resave your files to be viewed by your usual media player. It's free and supports a good amount of media, but don't expect too much from it.
Check out the screenshots below.
