bbrip... I too am at a loss on your issue. My only guess is that there is some rogue filter that is causing problems, but the whole thing is bizarre.
Larry and trott... You might not be aware of this, but we worked quite hard on this issue a few weeks ago (there was a three or four page thread). He has all the appropriate filters installed. If I recall properly, the MP4 files play back fine in all other DirectShow players (ZoomPlayer, MPC, WiMP, etc) and local-media MP4 files play back fine in MC. The issue affects
ONLY MC12 and affects
ONLY network-located files.
bbrip... Could you maybe give me a refresher on what you've tried? I know we tried manually fixing the MC12 registry for the DirectShow filters, and checked all the filters themselves. But remind me...
1. Did you do a complete uninstall of MC12 (including deleting all registry entries), reboot, and reinstall?
2. Did you try with a blank library (after the reinstall)?
3. Do the files work if you manually change the extension to MKV or AVI?
4. Have you checked to ensure your network can handle the traffic without corrupting data? I realize that the other players work, but they may be less sensitive to data corruption than MC is.
Regarding #4, if you haven't done serious testing on this... I have a little story. A year or two ago I was having an issue where playback of video files with MC from a network drive would work, but the videos would occasionally (and randomly) freeze during playback. Sometimes they would stop completely, and sometimes the audio or video stream would continue but the other wouldn't. If you simply skipped ahead or back a bit then it would "fix itself" and continue playing, but soon enough it would freeze again.
I couldn't figure it out and it only happened with MC. VLC and MPC both worked fine as far as I could tell.
Then... A little while later I noticed that in large groups of photos in MC, where the photos were saved on a network drive, the thumbnails would get "corrupted" (there's some screenshots on Interact if you care to search). It was random, and it was only the thumbs. The pictures themselves were fine. If I cleared my thumbnail cache, and re-thumbed, then
different ones would get corrupted.
Turned out that it was my network. Specifically, I had a bad piece of network hardware (a bad NIC card) on one machine, AND a messed up Windows install on another machine (which was caused by installing the craptastic Nvidia firewall program that came with my Nforce3 motherboard, which was impossible to remove without wiping the drive and starting from scratch). The way I diagnosed this was:
1. I created a few sets of known-good files and transferred them manually to my network drive (via an external drive). These sets were: a bunch of pictures (I grabbed a set of images from my photo collection), a set of game maps and textures from the original UT, a collection of 5-10 AVI files (TV shows), and 2 huge MPEG-2 movie recordings. All told the collection of test files was about 10GB and consisted of a blend of a few big monolithic files, a bunch medium sized JPEGs, and a HUGE number of small files (the UT maps and textures).
2. I then created MD5 hashes of these files (this is easy using
MD5Summer but you can use a command line MD5 generator if you want). I stored these MD5 files along with the test sets on the network drive.
3. I would then systematically start
MULTIPLE copy operations from each of my machines from the network drive, over to the C drive on the "receiving" computer. I discovered that grabbing the whole batch at once and copying over was
FAR more reliable with my system than copying each folder independently but simultaneously. In other words, I'd start one set copying, and while it was going, I'd start the next, and the next, and the next, so that they were all copying over at the same time. This, of course, makes it go slower, but it is harder on the network as well.
4. Once the copies were finished, I'd check the MD5 file against the new copies (using MD5Summer). While my network was messed up, it would almost always throw errors all over the place. Again, just copying the whole batch would usually work properly (I'd only get one or two corrupt files in the batch), but doing it the way I described above I'd get tons of corrupt files. You shouldn't get ANY at all.
5. I did this over and over, while making changes (swapping out hardware, changing network settings, changing cables, etc, etc, etc). I didn't consider the situation fixed until I was able to do this 3 times in a row with no corrupt files at all. On a few occasions I thought I had it because I'd make it through one "run" with no corrupt files, but then I'd run it again and it would fail. It turned out to be a long nightmare (as I said, there were two different issues) but I did eventually get it figured out.