MPEGS vs AVI's
 

Why do mpg movies start playing in Media Player as they download while avi movies don't?

since DIVX is some flavor of an avi i'm assuming they don't start playing until they are completely downloaded as well. correct?

Not sure but i think that avi's are compressed media files and need to be decrompressed before played...it's the same reason to why you can't unzip a zip file if you just downloaded 50%...

makes sense..........BUT............ avi movies are also compressed no?

MPEG (1)s are designed to stream. All the mpeg video codecs are. AVIs are generally not. Although that is not always the case - AVI is just a generic container. Mediaplayer (and IE) doesn't know what it's getting when it sees an AVI, so it usually assumes that it CAN'T be streamed.

If you change the file extension to .wmv or .asf or even .mpg, mediaplayer will probably stream DivX or WMV encoded AVIs..

Standard "uncompressed" AVIs don't stream, they're just not designed for it.

Cheers,
Backov