Media Player Frustrations
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Does this happen with all videos, or only some? It sounds like an incompatible or outdated codec. You can get a very nice codec pack from here[^], but only install the items you need - don't just grab everything, as some items are incompatible with others! I would suggest installing the latest Xvid and DivX codecs and see what happens...
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Something is wrong with either your video driver or your graphic acceleration settings. This "green area" is a chroma-key like trick so video cards can help playing videos. Aka "overlay area". Also, check any WMP and/or codec settings related to "overlay". I don't see dead pixels anymore... Yes, even I am blogging now!
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
The same happened to me a while ago. It was the video drivers: I've just reinstalled them and all has been fixed.;) ___________________________________ Tozzi is right: Gaia is getting rid of us. My Blog [ITA]
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Does this happen with all videos, or only some? It sounds like an incompatible or outdated codec. You can get a very nice codec pack from here[^], but only install the items you need - don't just grab everything, as some items are incompatible with others! I would suggest installing the latest Xvid and DivX codecs and see what happens...
All videos. I installed the codecs less than a month ago - it was happening before then.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Something is wrong with either your video driver or your graphic acceleration settings. This "green area" is a chroma-key like trick so video cards can help playing videos. Aka "overlay area". Also, check any WMP and/or codec settings related to "overlay". I don't see dead pixels anymore... Yes, even I am blogging now!
Yeah, that's what I figured it was. I played around with the video acceleration settings - even with no acceleration it was doing it. The only acceleration that fixed it was enabling the VMR, but this only fixed WMP, not embedding videos in presentations. This is one of the reasons I reinstalled DirectX, thinking that the non-VMR interfaces may be corrupt.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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The same happened to me a while ago. It was the video drivers: I've just reinstalled them and all has been fixed.;) ___________________________________ Tozzi is right: Gaia is getting rid of us. My Blog [ITA]
Unfortunately, any driver except the ones that came with the card don't work - obviously they're a doctored version of the nVidia ones (Geforce FX 5200). I've tried a few different versions, and none of them have actually worked.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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One of the reasons could be improper video acceleration settings. In Windows Media Player, go to Tools|Options, and in the performance tab, try different video acceleration settings.
Tried that. Even "no acceleration" had the same problem. VMR fixed it, but only for WMP itself; embedding videos in presentations still doesn't work.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Unfortunately, any driver except the ones that came with the card don't work - obviously they're a doctored version of the nVidia ones (Geforce FX 5200). I've tried a few different versions, and none of them have actually worked.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Ryan Binns wrote:
Unfortunately, any driver except the ones that came with the card don't work - obviously they're a doctored version of the nVidia ones (Geforce FX 5200). I've tried a few different versions, and none of them have actually worked.
That's strange. I used nVidia cards for years and I still use them, and I ALWAYS install drivers from the nVidia website. Currently I have a GeForce FX 5600 and it works very well with those drivers. ___________________________________ Tozzi is right: Gaia is getting rid of us. My Blog [ITA]
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Ryan Binns wrote:
Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers)
No - because that's likely where your problem is. The fact that you can't install a driver more recent than two years old tells me your card has a big problem that isn't going to be solved by tweaking settings for your old driver. The first thing I'd try is a different graphics card and see if you can install an updated driver for it. Cheers, Drew.
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Ryan Binns wrote:
Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers)
No - because that's likely where your problem is. The fact that you can't install a driver more recent than two years old tells me your card has a big problem that isn't going to be solved by tweaking settings for your old driver. The first thing I'd try is a different graphics card and see if you can install an updated driver for it. Cheers, Drew.
That's my next task. It's just about to pass midnight... I'll try tomorrow :)
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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Recently (ok, maybe like a year ago), WMP has decided to play all videos as though they were a nice green. The sound still works fine, I just get nothing bu a green background for the video. Interestingly, the video works fine for a few seconds, and then it all goes green, and WMP goes to about 98% CPU usage and dies. Normally, I don't use WMP for playing videos, but it gets used when I insert video clips into PowerPoint (or OpenOffice), and they exhibit the same problem. I've tried reinstalling WMP, DirectX and my graphics card drivers. Nothing has worked. In fact, installing anything more recent than 2-year old video card drivers causes Windows to use nothing but 640x480 16-color mode and refuse to let me change it. I hope my graphics card hasn't died - although everything else works perfectly - it's just WMP that doesn't. I've got to give a PPT presentation for a friend's 21st next Saturday night, and the presentation (including lots of video/sound clips) is too big to fit on a DVD, so I was just going to take my PC. Any ideas what else (other than possibly a dead graphics card/drivers) could be causing this? Or how to get OpenOffice to use something other than WMP for playing videos?
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Update your drivers. If that doesn't work then update your DVD player software. My Programming Library C#, C# Run