AVI Preview problems

Hi there, I am currently downloading a .torrent file which happends to be a full legnth movie and I try previewing it with AVI preview but it only let's you preview 8 seconds of the video. You can't even know if it's the right movie with an 8 sec. preview. Is there something better out there for previewing movie files? Am I doing something wrong?

Also another time when I tried to preview this movie in the begginning, AVI preview gave me this:

Rendering failed
System reports Ox800422F The file format is invalid.

AVIPreview failed to extract any relevant video data from the file (Are you sure that this is a video file?). Click Yes to visit the support section of h++P://www.avipreview.com to get more info on the subject.

Now when I go to the site for my details, it doesnt tell me anything about it. But I found out the reason for that. It was because I just didn't have enough downloaded at the time, but when I try it for a second time, I get this:

AVIPreview by AJ (www.avipreview.com) has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

Please tell Microsoft about this problem.
we have created an error report that you can send to us. We will treat this report as confidential and anonymous.

To see what data this error report contains, click here.

Send Error Report Don't send

Note:
I tried VideoLan the same time I was using AVIPreview, it worked just as well as AVIPreview did. The file is in XVID.

I've never been able to preview anything downloaded via bittorrent [unlike regular P2P apps].

Frankly I don't believe it's possible.

But the point is moot because you'll never get a bad or misnamed file via bittorrent.

Your best bet is to go to a website such as www.vcdquality.com and check out the jpeg samples and posted reviews of currently available bootleg movies.

If it wont play you wont be able to get it to.
i've foudn that sometimes it works if i'm lucky, other times it wont. :(

But your best bet is videolan anyway. ;)

Might work with videolan if you switch off the torrent client before you preview the file.

Never works for me tho :(

You might be able to in Light Alloy...
It works for DAT Files, so it might work for this also.

When downloading with BT, I've never been able to preview anything with AVIPreview. Come to think of it, half the time I preview anything with AVIPreview, it dies on me. AVIPreview is really unreliable for me.

The way to do this is if the avi is in rar format you can set priority in your bt client for the first few rars always keeping note that technically if there is one ending in just rar its the first even if listed last and then 00 and 01 and so forth. You can then extract the archive choosing to keep incomplete files in WinRAR and then play it.

Alternativly just set priority on the 10th rar in the archive as by that point it should be into where youll see what you want and then use VL to watch the rar file and make sure that rar is at 100% complete of course. If the file is in one part then it becomes difficult to preview with any player as the pieces are loaded fairly randomly...

Actually I think that, what Reality says is right.

And about it, most of the times I can't preview it either,
but once in a wile its posible, I just check to see what files (if there are more than one) are partially coplete and try to play it directly with DivX Player.