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Author Topic: Problems with playback of many (!) video file types.  (Read 1008 times)

claymore

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Problems with playback of many (!) video file types.
« on: July 03, 2007, 11:48:44 am »

Hi All,

I got troubles!  For some reason, after re-installing the most recent version of Media Center 12 after a clean install of Vista on my PC, many file types will not play.  While the player has no trouble with mpg or audio files, almost any video file type can not/will not play.  avi and mov files lock up the program; the audio track plays, but the video appears only in intermittent snippets or not at all.  The player becomes almost unresponsive - every once in a while it'll show the video, but when that occurs, the controls don't work and the player won't allow me to access the right click menu on the file's icon in the "playing now" area, so I'm unable to remove the file from the list and have to either wait for it to finish (or, if I'm lucky, there's another file in the playing now area, so I can use the "next track" button to escape the lockup).

Another area of trouble - divx files simply won't play.  If you double click on a file or use the system menu's "open with" command, nothing happens.  The file doesn't even appear in the playlist.  If you access the file directly through the player using "open file", Windows Media Player immediately pops up (on top of MC) and starts video playback!  I had similar problems with these file types when my PC ran on XP (they were actually worse - the computer would completely lock up with the audio continuing to play in the background)... at that time, I had the combined community codec pack installed (with ffdshow and the haali media splitter, etc.).  After the clean Vista install (not an upgrade), the trouble began before installing any codecs.  I finally installed ffdshow to allow Microsoft Media Player to access divx files.

Other problems exist with flash files, etc.

Anybody have any ideas?  Given the fact that similar problems occurred with XP, could it somehow be my license (doubtful)?  Is there some installation problem I'm not aware of?  I tried a reinstall which failed, then reinstalled again with my firewall/antivirus (Zonealarm) disabled without success.  I've finally uninstalled the player completely, hoping you can fill me in on a fix/possible solution.

I love Media Center.  I love the interface.  I love what it's capable of doing (when it works!).  I really don't want to use another player - but I may have to if I can't work this out.  Please help!  ?

Thanks,
Abraham

Info in case you need it:

Windows Vista Ultimate
Processor:  Intel core 2 extreme x6800 2.93Ghz
Memory:  2 GB corsair RAM
Hard Drive:  RAID 0 twin WD 250GB SATA II
Video card: Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX
Sound card:  Creative Labs X-Fi
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zirum

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Re: Problems with playback of many (!) video file types.
« Reply #1 on: July 03, 2007, 01:16:36 pm »

If you get it to work in Windows Media player, you may use those options in MC.
Click Tools / Options / Playback / Direct Show playback settings.

Here select "use windows media player settings whenever possible". Then those files should work, but tweaking are more limited. 
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JimH

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Re: Problems with playback of many (!) video file types.
« Reply #2 on: July 03, 2007, 05:06:21 pm »

In the FAQ here, there are some links to video threads by Yaobing and glynor.  It's probably a DirectShow issue.
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