I have somehow managed to whack my windows media player. I rather dislike it, but as I desire to watch al-Jazeera on my personal laptop and al-Jazeera uses ASF files, I need the fucker.
The issue is then that the Media Player (ver 6.01.05.0217) --no doubt due to something I’ve done in recent tinkering-- has decided that I have no audio hardware. This is very irritating as this is clearly not the case.
What I do want to avoid is installing anything new, I despise media player and prefer to avoid the bloatware.
have you installed anyting recently software wise? I had a similar problem and found it to be a directx plugin I had loaded. I unloaded it and all was well.
Yes, I have but I’m not sure which it might be. Part of the problem is normally I watch Jazeera elsewhere or on TV so I’m not sure when this media player issue arose.
Click on the text below the main page picture. That will lead to the latest reports from Afghanistan.
On the left side there are, below an image which shows of course the outline of a video camara, links. Any one of them leads to video from al-Jazeera in asf format. The first is Kaboul, the second is to recent video form Qandahar.
All I really want is to be able to play it again with sound. (If there are other players which can do so, I’d be happy with that too)
Does it give you an error message or is just a matter of just not giving you sound while playing? If the former, what is the exact message? If the latter, the first place I’d check is the speaker applet in your systray–make sure none of the audio lines are muted or at 0 volume.
Nothing so simple as mute. My realplayer works fine, as has quicktime. Just the bastid windows media player recently:
The error message: “Cannot play audio stream, no audio hardware is available.” Looking in properties I suspect that I may have an old audio codec but I can’t for the life of me find the win media audio 2 codec, striking me as a move to force an upgrade.
Hmmm, your Media Player is incredibly ancient. Some software you installed probably installed newer DX components and whacked MP. Try updating to v7.1, which I’ve always thought worked a lot better than v6 in any case. Here.
My other thought is that your MP didn’t break, al-Jazeera started ‘broadcasting’ in a newer format using newer codecs. There’s probably some ‘get Media Player’ badge on the website that updates viewers.
My friend lost her audio after doing a Windows Update not very long ago. I’m afraid I have no advice on how to fix it, as she just upgraded to XP, which solved her problem.
Question:
Audio will play but video won’t, or video will play but audio won’t.
Answer: As a first step, make sure that your PC has a sound card to play the audio (see instructions). If you do have a sound card, the content being played probably uses a compression codec that isn’t installed on your system. To ensure that you have all codecs currently supported, re-install Windows Media Player from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/download/default.asp.
Yes, that tends to happen with steaming sites. The newer version of the streaming format is 2x better quality and .5x the bandwidth of the last one. Who can blame them (a-j) for moving to the new stuff at some point? Just download the next version of the Borg Cube, er Media Player, and be resigned to it.
On MS’s site or A-J’s? Are you having trouble updating MP, or something else?
MS: their x-refs are bad, their search engine impossible. I got it eventually. Eventually after unnecessary work.
However, THE GODDAMNED 7.1 BLOATWARE STILL DOESN’T PLAY MY SOUND. Fuckers, fuckers. (no error messages, but also no sound.)
Okay, every other device has no problem. Only these sloppy motherfuckers. Can anyone help out here?
(Aside: al-Jazeera is Arab market, makes no sense for them to go English as they’d just be running into the big boys market for no return. BBC usually picks up their stuff and translates in good order. Indeed most al-Jazeera staff is ex-BBC Arabic Service. That’s the basis of their very positive news culture. Nota Bene, BBC Arabic actually has a somewhat diff. editorial feel than BBC per se. It “feels” Arab (in a positive way): damn good thing as it gets across better that way. )
1: Un-install the media player completely via add/remove programs before doing a new a new install.
2: If above doesn’t work try un-installing realplayer and see if this affects the media player (they don’t always play nice together). Re-install realplayer afterwards.
3: Did you do the Directx upgrade? This may be required for the new codec to function propertly.