All of a sudden WMP 12 can't play AVI files...

[Kelemvor]

No idea what happened but I can't play most AVI files any more with Windows Media Player 12 (Win 7). Some of them open but won't play. They let me scroll around in the movie but just won't play. Others give me an error.

Is there any way to figure out what's special about the ones that don't play to compare them to the one or two that actually do? I don't think I installed any new codecs or anything like that so I have no idea what might have changed.

Thanks.

 

[shortylickens]

Try VLC and see if it works. We can troubleshoot from there.

 

[Trader05]

My boss at work had a similar problem with WMP12. I had to go into sound settings in the control panel and disable all sound enhancements. I have no idea how they were on and why it would cause WMP not play a video file, but it worked.

 

[Kelemvor]

I tried them in Divx Player and they played fine so I know they are goo.d I'll check the sound stuff.

 

[zokudu]

Do you know what kind of video it is? AVI is a container format maybe the ones that don't play have some sort of weirdly encoded video. AVI is also very old. If you don't know how it was encoded you could be hitting one of these issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave#Limitations

 

[Kelemvor]

I checked the sound settings and didn't have any enhancements turned on. I disabled them anyway but it didn't help.

How can I tell more about the actual video? I know I've played these files before so something has to have changed.

 

[Kelemvor]

I used GSpot and it says both the Audio and Video codecs are installed.

Here's a screenshot of Gspot.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1787993/gspot.jpg