Something wrong in my PC with .avi files

[Georg Liigand]

Hi,

There's something wrong with .avi in my computer. Very often, when selecting or playing them from folders, they cause something like Explorer service to crash, my screen gets refreshed for a moment, the whole start menu and taskbar re-appears and some of the taskbar icons get lost. Also the folder where I was looking the videos from, disappears. I can then again go and watch the videos, but I have also encoutered some other issues after such crash, so it's better to restart. But it happens too often and sometimes it really starts slowing down my work as I have to continously re-open folders or even restart the workstation. A long time ago I remember that I heard something about a possible bug with Divx codec and that it may cause such trouble, but I haven't got rid of it so far. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks a bunch and happy Easter!

[Gurm]

Yeah there's a couple fixes for this floating around. What happens is that Explorer tries to preview and index every AVI it sees. If the AVI is large, poorly encoded, has glitches, uses an unknown codec, or often a combination of the above, Explorer will either:

- Eat up all the RAM in your system and suck up all the CPU time trying to render the file.
- Crash
- Run Dog Slow
- All of the above

To fix the problem... lemme go find it...

Ok here we go:

1. If it's JUST DIVX files that are making your life miserable, DIVX.Com has released a new new new version of their codec that fixes the problem. It's 5.2.1, you have to UNINSTALL the old codec (and any other codecs that support DIVX) and reinstall the new one. Please note that you have to get rid of ALL the codecs that might be rendering that file - Nero Showtime has codecs, so does Roxio, so do half a dozen things in the various codec packs. That's why I don't particularly like this solution, but hey...

2. If it's ALL kinds of AVI's (and MPEGs, and MOVs) that bug you (and me, this is what I do):

regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll

Put that in a run box or on the command line in a dos box. It'll turn off media preview. Reboot and things will be better.

3. You COULD also selectively remove it per file extension in the registry, leaving it in place for other filetypes, but frankly it's an irritating feature. If you really WANT to do it per filetype (i.e. turn it off for AVI but leave it on for MPG) you can do it like this:

A. Open up regedit.exe.

B. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shel lex\PropertyHandler

C. Delete the "Default" value which should be "{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}"

Repeat for every filetype that you DON'T want Windows to render. Just replace the .avi up there with .mpg to disable it for MPEGs as well. But frankly I like just unregistering the media preview, it's easy - and SUPER easy to undo if you decide later on to put it back.

4. Supposedly Microsoft has a hotfix for this, but they have refused to release it online. You have to CALL them, and apparently nobody has called them and then made it available - or maybe their "hotfix" is the registry hack listed above. Bleh.

Hope this helped!