| 19 Jan 2008 07:49 am |
Entree Rep: 0 Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 4 OFFLINE | I’m having problems playing certain avi files in Media Player Classic, and any other video player I try. These have all worked before, and it seems to be a random selection rather than all of them, but when I try to play them I just get a message saying “Cannot render the file”. If I look at their properties in explorer, rather than give the codec information it just says “summary not available”, and when I open it in gspot it says “Codec Status Undetermined”. These have all worked in the past, I haven’t got rid of any codecs, so I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas whats going wrong? As far as I can think, the only three things I’ve done which might have affected them is copy all my movies onto an external hard drive, installed and uninstalled real player, and installed some windows updates.
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| 24 Jan 2008 01:58 am |
Wannabe Rep: 0Joined: 07 Apr 2007 Posts: 56 OFFLINE | I’m not sure but it may be that when you uninstalled realplayer it took some of your codecs with it. Try reinstalling your codecs and see if that works.
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| 24 Jan 2008 07:13 am |
Entree Rep: 0Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 4 OFFLINE | That’s the first thing I thought, so I reinstalled the K-lite codec pack, but it didn’t help. I’m 90% sure that there were some problems before I started messing around with realplayer. The file’s use XVid, and some files with that codec randomly work, and some randomly don’t.
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| 24 Jan 2008 12:24 pm |
Regular Rep: 3 Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 1,239 | The current beta version of gspot returns “codec status undetermined” for wmv and mov files (and some others too i think), because there isn’t a sub-routine to check whether those codecs are installed. I have not encountered that problem when reading avi’s though.
You have not stated whether gspot recognizes the file as an avi or not. What does the container box say? If it is avi, what does the codec box say for fourcc?
And summary unavailable in explorer is expected for non-avi, non-wmv files. Your “avi” files could be another, but renamed extension; or if you were able to play them before but not anymore, they could be corrupt.
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| 25 Jan 2008 06:42 am |
Entree Rep: 0Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 4 OFFLINE | The container box says “MPEG Elementary Video << {1 vid}". They’ve definitely worked in the past, and I’m pretty sure they’re not non-avi files with a changed extension. If they’re corrupt, is there some way of uncorrupting them, or is it recycle bin time?
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| 25 Jan 2008 01:12 pm |
Regular Rep: 3Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 1,239 | Well gspot is definitely recognizing the file as MPEG. It’s not an AVI. If it was, you’d see “AVI 1.0” or “OpenDML AVI (2.0)" in the container box. If the extension is .avi then it’s definitely been renamed. And yeah, windows explorer doesn’t give summary info about MPEG files (renamed or not).
What I’m not getting is where are you getting the xvid from? (see post #3)
Now the question is why can’t you play it? Here are things you can try:
- Reinstall DirectX. quartz.dll is the default handler for MPEG-1 in Windows and comes bundled with DirectX.
- Play the file in an alternate player like VideoLan or Media Player Classic.
- Open the file in VirtualDub or VirtualDub-MPEG-2. VirtualDub is very good at scanning the contents of MPEG-1 files and reporting any inconsistency.
P.S: You have to use gspot (drag and drop on the gspot window) on each file that doesn’t work. You can’t assume that just because one fails to play, they all don’t play because of the same reason.
Beyond that the copy to the external drive could have gone wrong. I’d check the event viewer in the system log for any weird messages (especially ATAPI or disk). You could also do a full scan of the drive to make sure there are no bad sectors (those are early signs of a drive failure if files start to become garbled or unreadable).
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| 25 Jan 2008 02:22 pm |
Entree Rep: 0Joined: 17 Jan 2008 Posts: 4 OFFLINE | Having run a scan of the drive, it seems thats what I should have done first. A very long list of stuff seemed to be mangled, and Windows seems to think its 300GB bigger than it should be. I’ll reformat and take it from there I guess. Thanks for the help.
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