I recently reformatted my computer and reinstalled windows 7. Now half the videos I used to be able to play won't play anymore. Whats the deal? I downloaded every codec I could find. Half of my AVI's will play, half will not. I don't understand why. EDIT: It also appears that the ones that do work either force quit media player or cut out sound.
Bad idea, this can lead to incompatibilities and priority issues. Personally I recommend the Combined Community Codec Pack, which is put together in such a way as to prevent most of these problems. Plays damn near everything, with minimal errors. It also includes a build of MPC-HC specifically designed to work with it. Another popular one is K-Lite, but I'm not familiar enough with it to really say if it's any good or not. edit: It might be a good idea to use their "insurgent" program first, to clear off any faulty codecs you may have downloaded.
Seconding the CCCP, with an additional install of http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ - I'd recommend installing VLC first though so CCCP gets the extension associations.
Delete all the codecs and video players you have, including all codec packs including cccp, and use this instead: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ Use the 32-bit build, not the 64bit one. If you still have problems, use this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow-tr...neric%20builds/ Remember that you need to disable the problematic codec in mpc-hc and enable it in ffdshow, so the task of decoding is properly passed on to ffdshow. It should be noted that both ffdshow and the codecs in mpc-hc are based on the same source (ffmpeg), but standalone ffdshow builds tend to be more up to date. Do NOT use gpgpu/dxva/hardware decoding. It's problematic, depends a lot on drivers, and tends to fail spectacularly every once in a while. It also has no idea about the proper colorspace of some movies, so you end up with some movies being too dark and some being too light. CoreAVC suffers from the same. Ffdshow gets it right all the time, just set the output colorspace exclusively to rgb32. A properly configured mpc-hc + ffdshow setup plays pretty much every single thing on my end, including Real and Quicktime files (I don't have neither qt or real alternative installed). The only drawback is that you need a buff cpu to decode everything properly. However, I've seen a grand total of ONE video file that my Core 2 Duo e6550 3.2 ghz could not play properly: that particular file was a ~30mbit h264 Level 4.2 60fps 1080p digicam recording sample. More importantly, I can't play it with dxva hardware acceleration either, with a Radeon 6970. And no, you don't need haali splitter or vobsub or madvr or ac3filter or any of that bullshit. MPC-HC + ffdshow can do everything those other players can. Well, MadVR is supposedly better at resizing videos, but I watch 1080p rips on a Fullhd hdtv so it doesn't really matter to me. Also, Haali splitter supports ordered chaptering, which is useful for some movie and anime rips (having both normal and directors cuts in 1 rip for example). But I don't have any such samples so I can't confirm if MPC-HC itself can do it.
