Converting Dexter

Don't you just hate it when you spent weeks downloading a video only to find that it's in the wrong format for your video player?  Pain. In. The. Ass.

As I've mentioned more than once we're living in Mongolia right now, and our apartment is connected to the internet (barely) by a frayed cable that has been chewed to hell by a mongrel dog.  I'm not sure whether the connection was any better before the dog had her way with the cable, but it sure does suck right now.

So, my girlfriend has been getting into Dexter, the show about a serial killer police officer, and she asked me to download the first season so we can watch it together in English - our TV only shows it with bad Russian dubbing.  The process has taken 3 weeks, partly due to the crappy connection and partly due to the small number of seeders.

When the file finally finished downloading I tried to open an episode on my video player of choice only to find that it was in the MKV format, a file type that my player doesn't recognise.

So, to play the file we had to transfer is from MKV to AVI.  I've tried doing that once before, long ago, but couldn't find a decent program to do it.  After a looooot of searching I tracked down an MKV to AVI Mac compatible piece of software, and just five minutes later we were sitting down to watch a guy hack people to death in Florida.

Happy days.