Amiga specific content

[Tenacious]

A few years back, it was easy to find movie clips and other media that played well on OS 3.9.  I registered Riva for mpegs and MooVid for AVIs &  movs and was pleased with their performance.  Now, it seems their codecs are out of date.  It seems Microsoft and Apple are in a race for market share and COULD be changing the codecs as often as possible for their own benefit.  True?  (Thankfully, the mp3 format does not seem to be evolving at the same pace. grin)

How does an Amiga user catch the latest Harry Potter sneak-peak trailer on his favorite machine?  A. Get new codecs for the viewers listed above? (Are any available?)  B. Use an older version of Quicktime on a real Mac and convert the files to an older codec?  C.  Find a website where others have done these conversions already and posted (legal copyright issues?) the results?  D. Use a video format (open source) not controlled by greedy corporations?  (Yes, I acknowlege that some of the change is genuine improvement.) Are there new Amiga players?  I don't think that I have the horsepower for Frogger.

Maybe others have solved this and I'm simply out of touch. I would love to hear what the rest of you are doing.

[Tenacious]

You will have to forgive my ignorance.  I have a G3 Mac and a late model Windows laptop.  Are there converts for these 2 platforms that will re-encode high-res, high-color videos back to older, lower-res formats?  Are they freeware?  GRin.

I only have several generations of the reader version of QuickTime (not Pro).   I need to RTFM, but I thought there was no saving ability.

I'm beginning to suspect that even if this could be done, there migt be copyright issues if the converted videos were distributed online.  It also begs the question, if a person can watch the video on new equipment, why convert it for the Amiga?  OK, Im only a little obsessed but still healthy.