Help: WMP crashes with ALL movies...

[jase]

OK, bascially I can not play any movie files whatsoever in Windows Media Player anymore.

What happened is I formatted my harddrive... I then tried to open various movie formats, MPG, DiVX, AVI, ASF etc and WMP did it's thing and tried to d/l codec for some of them. Obviously (I think) it couldn't play the DiVX, but others played fine. I then installed the DiVX 4.12 codec (I think anyway) and from memory DiVX files still didn't play. I then tried installing DiVX 4.11 and 3.11 also, with no luck. In fact WMP just crashes now when I attempt to open ANY movie whatsoever.

Hmmmmm.

* Edited to add that I also can not even open DiVX files within TMPGEnc... it states that the file format is unsupported.

I have since removed ALL video codecs from Control Panel > Multimedia and then re-intalled DiVX and other WMP codecs (through either installing WMP or a codec package I downloaded). Still no luck. In fact I can't seem to re-install any other "standard" codecs, only the DiVX ones.

Anyone able to assist with this problem, or shall I re-format and start again, in the hope that it MAY work this time?

Cheers everybody, I appreciate the help.

J

[posdnya]

Looks, taht you installed some bad software.
When WMP goes to play some movie it tries to found decoder to decode it. It check every decoder in the system. I think, that one of them cause crash of your system. Try to uninstall ALL third party deocders, then MediaPLayer will answer something like - can't find decoder, but will not crash. And then try to find a good one.

[jase]

OK, managed to fix it.

Initially I had tried to open all of these movie files requiring various codecs directly into WMP. WMP then searched for the codecs, couln't find most of them, and spat the dummy.

At some stage along the way this crashing occured, so I tried to remove ALL codecs but then it was screwed for sure!

When I went to the MS site and downloaded the codec package, it wouldn't let me install any codecs because it was under the impression I didn't need them. Obviously they weren't all REMOVED fully.

The resolve: I HAD to upgrade to WMP 8, and then run the previously d/l'ed codec packagem which this time realised I didn't have them installed, THEN I individually downloaded and installed each additional (DiVX, SMR, etc) codec as required. Sweet as!

Here are some good links for those who may have a similar issue:

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/
-Scroll down the page and there's pretty much all the codecs you could want.