No sound with DivX

[Arucard]

I'm a bit lost here...

I'm getting no sound (or very little) in Windows Media Player when playing DivX AVI's.

What happens is that usualy the first few milliseconds of the sound gets repeated at equal intervals so at most I hear a 'beep' or a 'plop' repeated every second or so.

I though it had something to do with the installed codecs so I went out and installed the latest DivX 5.0.3 and I got the NimoCodec Lite Pack as well and installed all the relevant stuff I could find in it.

No results there so I upgraded to Media Player 9. Still the same. No sound, so I got the NimoCodec Build 8 pack and again made sure anything even remotely relevant got installed. No sound (well, the same repeated sound behaviour I described earlier).

Then I grabbed me a copy of GSpot and AVIcodec to see what was so special about these DivX files. Nada : GSPot is telling me all should work fine cause all the necessary codecs are there and AVIcodec is pointing me to stuff I already got.

The very same DivX-file plays just fine with sound all the way through in VirtualDub and DivX Player 2.0 Alpha but since the first ain't really a player and the second is less stable than Windows Media Player I really want the latter to work here.

So, thinking it was only Windows Media Player I installed the Zoom Player and BSPlayer. Both of them play the DivX with NO decent sound. Well, same behaviour as Windows Media Player I mean.

My question is why do Windows Media Player, Zoom Player and BSPlayer have problems while VirtualDub and DivX Player 2.0 Alpha work fine ? What's the difference here ?

Oh, yeah. Windows Media Player has no problem with the MPEG-2 files I made out of these DivX files (I'm converting'm to SVCD).

All of this on an AMD Athlon +2100, 768 MB Ram, Windows 2000 Professional/SP2.

If you need any other info I'd be glad to provide it.

Thank you!

BTW Here's GSPots output when asked about the codec for sound concerning these DivX file :
ACM Format Tag 0x0055
ACM Format Name MPEG Layer-3
ACM Short Name MPEG Layer-3 Codec
ACM Long Name MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional)
ACM Copyright Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Kristal Studio
ACM Features all bitrates, mono and stereo codec (professional)
DSH DirectShow Codec CLSID_ACMWrapper {6A08CF80-0E18-11CF-A24D-0020AFD79767}
FIL CompanyName Open Source
FIL FileVersion 0.3.0
FIL InternalName drvACM
FIL LegalCopyright Copyright © 2001 Steve Lhomme
FIL OriginalFileName drvACM.acm
FIL ProductName ACM dummy test
FIL ProductVersion 0.3.0
FIL Comments This is currently a test of an ACM driver for Win32, it will later be used for the ACM Driver of Lame (OSS MP3 encoder)
FIL LegalTrademarks See BSD license
REG Driver File C:\WINNT\System32\lameACM.acm

[Arucard]

Well, almost two weeks later and after numerous other attempts Windows Media Player still ain't giving me sound when playing Divx/Xvid AVI's.

Further steps I took were installing DirextX 9, Servicepack 3 for Windows 2000, removing all codecs and only putting DivX 5.0.3 back etc... no results.

However, when I upgraded my sound card drivers to their latest version I get a blue screen of death (hercspud.sys) when playing Divx/Xvid files now so I installed the drivers I had before again and I'm back at square one. No sound for Divx/Xvid AVI's.

My soundcard is a Hercules Game Theater XP (you know, the one with the blue breakout box). Running driver-version v5.011 I have the problems described in my first post. Running v6.07 drivers I get the BSOD when playing Divx/Xvid's.

To sum it up, my question is now do any other Game Theater XP owners experience problems like I do ? I'm starting to think it's my soundcard's drivers here.

Thanx.