Big Nasty Mess Of Codecs

[mgolobay]

Over time whether I installed them intentionally or Windows Media Player decided to grab them, I have this big nasty mess of codecs installed. Recently my system developed a problem where some new and potentially way cool music videos cause the Windows Media Player to start, show a black screen for maybe a second and then terminate. In discussing the problem with others, nobody else has seen it.

So, I've got some lame codec that is crashing or some supernatural interaction/conflict of codecs.

And now, finally, the question... is there a codec maintenance tool that will check out your installed codecs, find problems, do diagnostics, and/or help with upgrades? Native Windows 2000 codec handling capabilities are basically non-existent. In my experience Win2K can't even uninstall a codec. It says it did, but on reboot they're back.

Is there a tool that will let me see what codec an MPG will use if played? Maybe I'll just try to delete whichever one is keeping me from playing these videos and try to re-install.

Advice here or my inbox (mgol@pobox.com) would be greatly appreciated.

[David K]

Great free program DXMan. Use the following link

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/dxman.htm

It will show you all the DirectX filters and allow you to remove ones if you want.

Also check out media player classic in tools. This shows you exactly what filters are being used when you play a media file and allows you to block filters.

[mgolobay]

Oddly enough, the Windows Media Classic player does play the video while the default player in Windows 2000 does not. I looked around in the codecs section here and tried Gspot to investigate the file. It indicates that it is an MPEG1 video which uses the standard Microsoft MPEG video decoder.

When I tried to convert it with TMPGenc it died right away just like the media player. I caught it in my visual studio debugger and learned that the abnormal termination is due to an access violation (0xC0000005) in quartz.dll.

So, its a Microsoft bug. Will I have any luck reporting it in the Microsoft public newsgroups?

[marvel2020]

Just a thought maybe you haven't got the quartz.dll installed on your system.

If not grab it from here......

http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?quartz

maybe that will help.