My computer has been driving me absolutely NUTS lately. One of the biggest reasons for this is that NONE of my video-capable application will play .avi video files anymore. I have WinAmp, Quicktime Player and this funky other program called BS Player, and they have all gone from working fine a month or so ago to not working at all in the last few weeks. What gives? I’ve had a computer that didn’t play .avi because of a missing codec, but the weird thing here is that it worked fine before! And besides, that was back in the Dark Ages of Windows 98 SE. All the .avi files that worked perfectly, oh, six weeks ago now only play audio on every single one of my players. It’s clearly a system-wide problem, but I haven’t a clue what it could be. Any suggestions for what I could do to solve this are greatly appreciated.
You’re probably missing the right DivX codec. “Probably” because a lot of codecs use the avi extension, but DivX is the most popular one. The simplest way to solve this problem is to use the VLC media player.
Yeah, VLC is a good media player.
Another alternative is to go with Media Player Classic and the ffdshow DirectShow/VFW codec library. That’s what i use, and will allow you to play just about anything.
Yeah, Media Player Classic and ffdshow are great together. It’s what I use too and definitely recommend if you’re willing to take the extra bit of effort to get it going.
Did you uninstall a program that took out a lot of codecs along with it? That’s what happened to me awhile ago. I found this program called Gspot that will render a media file and tell you if your computer has the necessary codecs, and if not, how to get them. Pretty cool.
http://www.snabbstart.com/download/gspot-codec-information-appliance.aspx
Whoops. Apparently that’s an old version. Here’s the newest I have
Whoah! So many helpful responses! Thanks guys!