Is there a way to remove every codec and video setting on your computer?

Factual Questions
1

Ok here is the situation. I use Media Player Classic to watch videos. Its a free open source lightweight program that plays almost all videos including .flv. Now lately it seems to have some problems with WMVs but only randomly. It plays all other files fine. Now what i mean by this is sometimes when i double click a wmv file it will only show the first frame and freeze and i will have to do a Ctrl Alt Del to close the program…Now if it was just one file that always did this i would understand but sometimes the file works and sometimes it doesn’t! If i do a restart flip a coin and try again it might work! So i am really confused. It only effects WMV files. Windows Media Player ALWAYS plays them fine no problem. And no i will not just use WMP

Now to resolve this problem i have done the following. I have downloaded and reinstalled Windows Media 11 codec. I have removed Media Player Classic. All my codec packages, ffdshow, etc deleted all there folders and ran two registry cleaners…Then restarted a few times and reinstalled everything and it still doesnt work. I even copied a few WMVs and Media Player Classic to a Virtual Machine i have for testing purposes and everything worked all the time 100%. So i am not sure where to take this now… I do not really want to do a reformat. Any ideas?

2

DL and use VLC media player. Free and I find it more stable and than classic media player which tends to flake out and locks up more easily.

3

ahem

Get VLC player. It’s also an open-source, lightweight player, except it comes with every conceivable codec already built in. No mucking around with codecs or codec packs or directshow filters or the rest of that nonsense.

I wish I had an actual answer to your problem, since I’ve encountered things like it plenty of times before.

4

Everybody always says that VLC is the answer to everything. The one thing VLC does NOT come with is PCM output though (Dolby Digital/DTS). It will still play the audio, but converts it to regular 2 channel audio first. This is the main reason I MPC instead of VLC.

5

Well i only have a 2.1 sound system so thats not an issue. I looked into VLC player is it just as lightwight and small as MPC? is it a standalone exe like MPC?

6

It’s not quite as small or lightweight (30 mb installed versus… 3 mb? for MPC). It’s not a standalone .exe either, but the entire install folder is completely portable. One upside of that is that you don’t have to worry about what codecs are installed if you use VLC on some other computer. Of course, that’s what makes it larger… I just tossed the folder onto my USB drive, and I could use VLC off of it from a random lab computer. And I will admit the interface is rather clunky.

7

VLC users - do you uninstall WMP? If so, does VLC still play content embedded into webpages and such?

8

To answer your question, Chris, I have used Codec Sniper to do this in the past with reasonable success. I’ll throw in my support for the suggestion of VLC, but if you’d like to decraptify your other media players in the meantime, that’ll do it…just be careful you don’t delete anything you actually need.

9

Wait how did you know my name is Chris…there is some bad ju ju on this bored thats just creepy…Anyways I think i am going to give VLC a try. MPC seems to have been abandoned i just like how lightweight it was.