Ok, I have an issue that I haven't been able to find an easy answer for so far, and I can only hope I'm posting in the right place. If not, please forgive me. I downloaded some episodes of a tv show in avi format, no big deal, right? I've never had problems with watching or converting this type of file. But here's the kicker.. With these shows, I had a terrible amount of trouble playing them in any program. I have Windows Media Player 9 series, Winamp Pro, Nero Showtime, and Core Media Player, and none of them wanted to open this file. I finally somehow got the first episode to play, but then the second episode wouldn't load right in any player. I thought it was a codec issue, so I got Gspot, and it told me I was missing the XviD codecs. I get the codecs and install them (not a very user friendly process depending where you go.. *groan*) and I'm able to watch the second show. The rest of the problems begin here. It seems I can't properly open these files, even though Gspot says they are complete and I have the codecs necessary, except for one at a time, per boot. What I mean is... I can watch one movie correctly, everytime I restart windows, but any further attempt to open a similar file results in nothing happening and Windows Media Player crashing if I don't exit properly. None of the other programs even want to pretend to work to view these files, which are supposedly complete files in XviD. And on top of that, I have problems viewing videos that I previously never had problems with. Either they won't play at all, or there's no audio on some of them, which I have viewed with audio in the past. I'm fairly confident I could convert and burn these to DVD if I had to, but it's a real pain in the ass to not be able to properly watch them first before I do anything else. I've downloaded security updates to Windows Media Player and my Win2k, run antivirus programs, etc... but I just can't understand why it seems that I can only at best open one file correctly before all my audio/video playback seems screwed, no matter what application I use. Can someone give me a hint? The problem seems so large and vague that I barely know where to begin.
ok, a bit more explanation. (and maybe this belongs in the playback section, or xvid? not sure...wake up, mods! heh) The problem, as far as I can figure, seems to do with anything that's XviD encoded, or that my XviD codec supports, like any other 4CC types. Windows Media player will open a file once, play it fine, but then it just "hangs" stuck on the first frame or so when I try to open another file of the same kind (or even the same one). Winamp is also acting up. The only thing that seems to work is VLC media player, which opens and plays all these files just fine, and I can watch them repeatedly and do whatever as normal. I've checked all the files I'm attempting to play with Gspot, and they call come out as being correct size and all that, and it says my XviD codec is installed and should work. On top of that, I attempted to use NeroVision (I know, I know, there's yet another forum for that, but I can't post everywhere, can I?) to neatly convert and burn some episodes onto a disc with a simple menu. I've done this before with perfectly satisfactory results with other avi's. When messing around with menu options, seems fine. I'm even able to scroll around and pick a frame from the movies to use as stills for the buttons. However, when it gets to the preview screen, while the buttons are clickable and attempt to play the episodes they're linked to, the same sort of "hanging up" happens. I figure, whatever, I should be able to still convert them and they should be watchable. When it goes to transcoding and burning, Nero hangs up too. The status bar for the "preparing to transcode" fills up in 4 seconds.. and then the "time elapsed" counter just keeps going and going and going while nothing else occurs... and I become unable to abort and end up having to use task manager to close Nero. So what's the deal with my DivX and Xvid files? Why am I getting such a hassle with playback and other stuff when I supposedly have the codecs and good, complete files? Sure, I can watch them all in VideoLan, but I shouldn't have to rely on that. WMP and WinAmp and all my other players should work just fine, and I should also be able to use whatever utility I want to encode or burn these, right? As far as I remember, I never had this problem until just the other day, and I can't think of any major thing I've done to my system. Once again, it seems if I restart my system I'm ok for one more try, but then the cycle starts over again. If I didn't have VLC, I'd have to reboot for every single thing I wanted to watch seperately.. that's just not acceptable. Any advice? Should I try reinstalling some stuff? Getting better codecs? Maybe even thoroughly cleaning malware up? (which I've been doing some of)....
