Can't view a video in Media Player 10?

[setarip]

1) Load the original video file into VirtualDub (or one of its many variants) or NanDub

2) From the "File" dropdown menu, select "File Information"

3) Post (here) EVERYTHING you see (BOTH video and audio information), or post a screen capture .jpg of the information box

[Lardzor]

I hope this helps

This assumes you have Windows XP.

When you install a codec, it registers itself with the operating system trying to make itself the default for it's specific type of media (Divx3, Divx5, Xvid, Mpeg2, ect..) Many codecs (codec packs) include an uninstall feature to allow you to easily remove them, many do not.

First I would recommend that you uninstall whatever new codecs you have recently installed. If you have installed codecs that did not include an uninstall feature, then you MAY still be able to remove them with these steps. (you need to know in advance which codecs you want to remove)

1) open "System" from the control panel.
2) Select the Hardware tab, and left click on the 'Device Manager' button.
3) Find and expand (click the '+') the listing for 'Sound, Video, Game controllers).
4) Right click on the listing for 'Video Codecs' and left click on properties.
5) Select the tab for 'Properties' and now you can remove any video codec you want. Just don't remove the default Windows codecs wat were installed when windows was installed.

Now you need to install the DivX 3 codec for the specific video you want to play. You only need to install that one codec, which is freely available from:

http://www.free-codecs.com

For the sake of avoiding the problem of not haveing the right codec at the time, I would like to make a couple of recommendations. First, at codec does two things. It compresses, and decompresses media to it's paticular standards. If all you want to do, is view the media, and don't plan to encode your own media to it's standards, you only need to decompress. There is a VERY fast decompressor called FFDshow. You can find it at the same codec website I listed above. It will handle all popular media types includeing Divx. It's very configurable allowing you to modify everything from brightness/contrast to god knows what, but default settings are fine for pretty much everything.

If you do plan on doing your own encoding of media, say you want to convert DVD's to AVI, then you will need the ability to compress as well. There are many popular codec packs available for this purpose. They generally include the most popular audio/video codecs with some variation. I like the 'K-Lite' codec pack. It comes in three flavors, Lite, Standard, and Full I think. I use the Standard version and have yet to come across a video I could not play. The K-Lite codec pack will also install a few usefull utilities such as Media Player Classic, and GSpot (a very usefull tool to see what codecs are installed, and gives detailed info about avi files and what is required to view them). It has it's own uninstall feature, and is available from the same website I listed above.

Since whenever you install a new codec, it registers itself as the default, if you choose a codec pack, it should be installed before you install FFDshow. That way, you have the ability to encode from the original codec, but you will have the speed of FFDshow when you want to decode to view the media.

I hope this has been helpful.