Why does WMV take so long to load?

[Cyberian v2.0]

What is the deal?

And how do I make it load faster?

[mats.hogberg]

I think you have to elaborate a little o that one...

/Mats

[jimmalenko]

Are you talking about a specific editing/encoding program ?

WMVs in a website ?

a little help please

[Cyberian v2.0]

The file I play in my HD.

When I execute the file takes a long time to load and play. Or skip ahead while the video is playing, it lags for like 10 seconds, then finally plays.

[jimmalenko]

I would blindly say that your PC is possibly not operating as effectively as it could be. There could be any number of reasons for this from a fragmented hard drive to a cluttered registry or corrupt codecs. It might be an idea to fill in your computer details so that we know exactly what type of machine and OS you are using.

[thor300]

Could also be a poorly indexed file. WMVs can be encoded without any index at all (for streaming purposes i think)

[Cyberian v2.0]

My computer is newly reformated.

Win 2000 Pro SP4
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ @ 1.67 GHz
ECS K7S7AG
256 DDR RAM

It also had the same problem when I was using XP.

[jimmalenko]

Is it 1 file or a couple of files or all WMVs ?

Could Windows Media Player be set up to check the web for codecs ?

[SaSi]

If loading a WMV file on Media player takes a long time and then skipping forward or backwards appears to lock-up media player for a few seconds up to a few minutes, it means that the WMV file is not indexed.

With non-indexed files, media player (or any s/w that reads the file) needs to scan every frame until the approximate location of the skip.

ASF Tools can re-index the file so that it seeks fast.

In case you wonder why the file is not indexed in the first place, it's because removing any indexing information on streaming files saves this extra bit of bandwidth required to stream them efficiently over dial up lines.