Windows Media files no worky.

Factual Questions
1

WMP has decided to hate me. When I ask it to play a windows media file (either .wmv or .avi), it randomly selects whether or not it wishes to do so. If it does not, it will produce the infamous “WMP has encountered an error and needs to close. Send error report?” dialog box.

Once it has decided which files it will or will not play, it will work or not work (respectively) for those files every time. The odd thing is, I can find no correlation between files it does/doesn’t play. I’ve checked file type…no good, it plays some .wmv and some .avi, just not all of either. I’ve checked file size…no good, it will play half-hour anime episodes and ten-second clips (except, of course, for the ones it randomly rejects). I know it’s not a codec issue; there are video files on my hard drive that it used to play just fine and now refuses, besides which I have all the most popular codecs installed anyhow.

I tried removing WMP from my system, rebooting, downloading the install file from the MS website, reinstalling, and rebooting. Reinstall worked fine; problem not solved. I tried removing it again, and installing from an older version of WMP that was hanging around in Program Files. Reinstall worked fine; problem still not solved. I dumped WMP again, removed every last trace of everything video-player-related (codecs, RealOne, DivXPlayer, etc.), rebooted, re-downloaded the install files directly from the various sources, reinstalled everything (rebooting after every single frickin’ one), and then reinstalled the latest WMP. All of that went fine; problem still not solved.

NOTE: I tried using RealOne as a surrogate default, but it acts same way, on the same files, as does another video viewer I have. QuickTime, of course, does not play .avi or .wmv, and I haven’t had any problems with it on .mpg or .mov files.

One thing I want to get out of the way right now: I update and run Spybot and AdAware daily. Ditto for AVG. Sooo, anybody have any ideas as to what I should do? I’m pretty much tapped out here. All suggestions appreciated.

2

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it: XP Home, and yes, SP2 is installed.

3

Go to Tools --> Options, and select the File Types tab. Hit the Select All button at the bottom, then try again.

4

No good. It still crashes when I try to play one of the Untouchable files.

5

If i might suggest a somewhat different approach: get rid of WMP and don’t use it at all. I use the following on my computer:

Media Player Classic
ffd show
RealAlternative
QuicktimeAlternative

This combination of player, codec and plug-ins will allow you to play just about anything you’re likely to encounter in the way of digital video and audio.

Media Player Classic is an open source (GNU GPL) media player, and has none of the bugs or the annoying problems of WMP. It’s small, streamlined, and easy to use, and the skin will be familar to anyone who’s used older versions of WMP.

The ffdshow codec effectively replaces all those other individual crappy codecs on your computer, allowing you to play a variety of video formats, including mpeg, wmv, asf, avi, divx, xVid, etc., etc.

RealAlternative and QuicktimeAlternative allow you to play rm, ram, mov, and any other Real or Quicktime files and embedded media without having the annoyance of actually having Real or Quicktime on your computer. This means that you won’t have to deal with Real’s resource-hogging crappiness, or the constant annoyance of being bugged to “upgrade” by Real and Quicktime.

I made the switch to this layout a few months ago, and haven’t regretted it for a second. Media Player Classic even plays my DVDs with no trouble at all.

6

Without more information, I am still suspicious of the files themselves. Where are these files coming from? Are you sure they are complete? With avi files, it may simply be a missing codec although that will not normally crash the player. How is your system running otherwise? Are you having other problems?

With the avi files, you can try running them through TMPGEnc as it usually does a pretty good job of letting you know if the file itself is corrupt.

Do you have the Divx codec installed? Many avi files found in newsgroups and/or file sharing applications have been encoded with Divx and WMP will not find it on its own.

Divx

You can also find some useful tools here .

I hope this helps. Good luck!