MPC Home Cinema will not play DivX

[DarrellS]

Cannot play AVI files encoded with the divx codec.

[yoda313]

Try vlc to play them instead. (also is mpc home cinema a mod of media player classic? If it is then try the generic media player classic also).

Also just to be sure verify they are indeed divx with gspot or avicodec.

[DarrellS]

The reason I am using Home Cinema is because all of a sudden, all of my HD XviD were playing out of sync in all of my other players. Home Cinema cured the problem but left all the divx AVI unplayable. MPC will play the divx AVI but will not play the HD files correctly. Not sure what caused this problem since they played correctly before.

I had to change the extension of all my divx files to AVI so I can play them with my Western Digital HD media player since it will not play AVI with the .divx extension. I guess my only option is to change the extension back to divx on my storage drive and just use the AVI extension on my external drive.

Another thing that has me puzzled is that it takes an hour to move 12GB worth of files from one drive to another. I thought it was because I was moving them to an external drive using firewire or USB (can't get e-SATA to work) but moving from one internal SATA drive to another takes just as long. Is there a faster way to do this? It will take forever to fill up a 500GB drive at that rate.

[jagabo]

You shouldn't have to do this but try:

MPCHC: View -> Options -> Internal Filters -> Transform Filters... disable Divx.

[DarrellS]

You shouldn't have to do this but try:

MPCHC: View -> Options -> Internal Filters -> Transform Filters... disable Divx.

Thanks Jagabo, that did the trick. Before I read your post, I had to restart my computer because PowerDVD froze and after it restarted, I tried some more files and it seemed that MPC Home Cinema would play files with normal resolutions (1024x576_1280x720_720x480) but no off sizes would work. After trying your suggestion, now they all play.

Any way to speed up my file transfers? Small files tranfer in a few seconds but anything over 1GB takes about 20 minutes.

If I copy a 400MB file to the same drive, it takes about 20 seconds, if I move the same file to a different drive it takes 3 or 4 minutes.

[jagabo]

I don't know what's going on with your drive transfers. I just copied a 2 GB file from one drive to another (both internal SATA) in about 30 seconds.

Maybe one drive is in PIO mode? A/V software?

[DarrellS]

I turned the AV software off and it speeded things up some but nowhere near your speeds. It took 5:30 to move a 1.17GB file.

Here are screenshots of IDE Controllers in Device Manager...

[DarrellS]

I installed a program called TeraCopy that is supposed to speed up file transfers and doing a test run of a 2GB file, it says it's running at 42MB/s which sounds pretty good but when I actually go to move the file, it says it's moving it at 3.5MB/s and takes 10 minutes to move the file.

[DarrellS]

Problem solved. I couldn't figure out how to reset the Ultra DMA in device 1 on primary channel so I uninstalled the controller and let Windows reinstall it and my speeds are back to normal. I was capturing from my Hauppauge HVR 1800 the other day and when I went to turn off the TV tuner, I had an error message that a hardware failure had occurred. I guess Windows had shut down DMA mode. What was weird was that the game was over but the TV tuner was still in the first quarter. The capture was complete though.

Thanks for leading me in the right direction and also for giving me the cure for Media Player Classic Home Cinema. When I woke up this morning, I couldn't play the HD XviDs that I could play yesterday so I got rid of the XviD filter also and that allowed the HD XviD files to play again. I assume this version of MPC has built in codecs that cause conflicts with the codecs already installed?

[jagabo]

I assume this version of MPC has built in codecs that cause conflicts with the codecs already installed?

All MPC's codecs are built-in and private to MPC. So MPC can't cause problems for the rest of the system. I would say it the other way around -- some installed file reader, file splitter, codec, colorspace converter, and/or display driver is causing problems for MPC's built in Divx decoder.

In that same dialog are you using MPC's internal AVI source filter?

[DarrellS]

Yes, the avi source filter is checked.

I had to put the checkmark back next to XviD again because those files were playing out of sync. All this is pretty weird to me. I hadn't needed to use Home Cinema before. I have used Media Player Classic for years and never had to change any of these settings.

I couldn't play my MPEG PS so I unticked that under source and now I can play the MPEG PS files but now they're out of sync. Everything was playing fine in MPC Saturday. I don't know what happened.

[jagabo]

It sounds like your system is seriously messed up.

[DarrellS]

I can play the MPEG-PS files in Nero Showtime with no problems. I guess the thing is to rename all the MPEG-PS files to MPEG or MPEG-PS instead of MPG and associate them to Nero Showtime since I need MPC to play online mpg files.

I think the problem with my system that you speak of is XP. I never had these problems with 98SE or W2K. XP wants to force you to use Windows Media Player to play all your media files. Took forever to figure out how to play online files with MPC in XP and they still don't play like they did in 98 and W2K. They have to download to a temporary folder before MPC can play them unlike 98 or W2K which would play the files instantly (except for WMV which had to download to a temporary folder) when you clicked the link.

I did upgrade ffdshow not too long ago. Maybe that's causing problems with MPC. I'll uninstall it and reinstall the older version that worked.

One thing I've noticed since installing XP is that Codec Sniper will not work. A message pops up in German and then the program opens but nothing is in it. No buttons and no list of codecs. GSpot doesn't list any problem codecs.

[Ai Haibara]

Regarding ffdshow, since they update it fairly often, you could also try a more recent build. (...and, if you prefer, tell the installer to delete all your existing settings, then reconfigure everything. That might help, too.)

[DarrellS]

The build I had was 20081028. I went ahead and reinstalled it and only configured VFW. The older builds only tried to install 5 or 6 codecs by default on install but if you don't pay attention, the newer builds will try to install everything. I unchecked all video and audio codecs. I used to check the H264 codec but I don't need to now.

I don't notice anything different though. I was just notified of a divx update that supports odd resolutions so that might help with some files. The way MPC-HC is set up now, it would not play one XviD HD trailer that I have so I had to convert it to DivX. I'll probably just start encoding everything to divx now.

[DarrellS]

I think I got it figured out. I went into the XViD decoder properties and unticked everything and now all my AVIs play correctly.