The other day I downloaded a video file which was an .NSV file. I had never heard of an NSV but I tried playing it on my media player of choice (media center) anyway, it didn’t work, of course…. bastards. After doing some searching on the net I found that NSV is a Winamp file format. I really didn’t feel like installing winamp because I like to complicate my life and would rather spend several hours converting it to a format that my present media player can handle, I am weird like that. Anyway, I hit google and started searching for ways to convert NSV to AVI, I found some results but they all seemed far to complicated. Some of these methods required three to four pieces of software and I didn’t care that much about this video. But, I am a stubborn son of a bitch and I kept looking for an easier solution. I finally hit pay dirt.

I found a little program called MikkoNSV which claimed to do it all in one shot. I downloaded and installed it and gave it a try. It went through the conversion process with no problems but when I went to play the resulting AVI file I was only getting sound, no video. After some poking around I found that MikkoNSV was using some funky video codec, after some more poking I found that FFDSHOW codec pack can play just about anything so I decided to give it a try (I have FFDSHOW installed on my HTPC). After installing FFDSHOW I tried to play the file and bingo, success! Hopefully if anyone else has the same problem that I did you find this post useful.

The video that I went through all the trouble for ended up sucking elephant testicles.