Vista - Vista Media Center refuses to play videos

I've been using Media Center for XP and then Vista for a few months. Due to a random pause issue that I can't track down, I've built another MCE-HTPC and installed Vista x64.

The install of Vista and hardware went about as smooth as it can get. BUT... now that I've installed my codecs and such, MCE won't play any videos. These are videos that 32-bit XP MCE and Vista MCE had no issues playing before.

In fact I can even load Windows Media Player and it will play the same videos with out a problem. But once I load MCE, I get the "can not locate codec" and it refuses to play.

Since I've not had problems in the past... I is there a cache or database of some kind that Vista32 might have left that now Vista64 is trying to read and it's now unable to load the videos?... also, I did update my codecs to newer versions as well... is it possible that Vista32 had "named" codecs list and now Vista64 is trying to find the same codec name... only it's changed?

I'm a little lost on this one.... so continue my VistaMCE issues.

I just want it to work.

Well in my experience, Codec packs are more trouble than they are worth. I would totally uninstall any codec packs you have. MediaCenter downloads the codecs it needs automatically. It sounds to me like the codecs are fighting each other for who is gonna do the job, so to speak, so in fact they are cancelling each other out and leaving you with nothing.
Get rid of the packs is the short answer. Use "GomPlayer" as your Video player.It has inbuilt codecs and is free and totally brilliant with tons of setup options. I now use it all the time and never look back.
If you still wanna use MCE then deffo get rid of the codec packs.

Thanks for the reply...

I understand what your saying... but I didn't have any issues with this codec pak (K-Lite Mega Codec Pak) before.

The reason I'm using the codec pak is because I also have RealMedia and QuickTime files that I really want to use through MCE and it's worked just fine before.

I also thought that MCE simply used Windows Media Player as the player and if I'm outside MCE, I can load WMP and watch everything directly... but MCE can't load them.
WinXP MCE worked
VistaMCE 32-bit worked
VistaMCE 64-bit not working?.... makes me wonder.... did they change the directory lookup in 64-bit so that maybe MCE isn't looking in the same place as 32-bit for codecs???

This is very annoying.

I'd be very happy to use another player that will play everything I need (DivX, DVD, RealMedia, QuickTime, (many,many) AVI formats).

In fact I looked into using MCE to load RealPlayer or QuickTime inside MCE but I was told it wasn't possible.

No probs. Well Gomplayer plays anything you can throw at it. I mainly have AVI files like yourself, so.... AS far as the packs are concerned...did you download the 64bit versions of this pack. 64bit system needs 64bit codecs!
Another suggestion. Get rid of the pack and install 64bit FFDShow..you tried that?

That could be the issue... I didn't know that I needed 64bit codecs.

.... that would explain why they worked in my 32-bit installs... and now not in Vista x64.

But I'm still confussed as to why these codecs run all my movies in Windows Media Player, but not MCE.

I'll try looking for 64-bit versions and see if that helps.

Hey guys -
I realize this thread is almost a year old at this point, but in case someone who
was going as crazy as me with this problem is checking, I figured I'd share what finally worked for me. For a while, everytime I tried to open up a video of ANY kind (avi, mpeg, mkv... almost the whole gambit) it woudl give me the error message of death and i could either restart or close. Because of this, I chose the wrong option of dl'ing cccp - didn't work. then ffd and vista codecs... nope. And finally one or two other additions to vista (video browser and media portal extention i think). After a week or two i actually reinstalled the %$A$ thing just to see if a clean slate would work (nope). Basically, this thread is ALMOST right - you definitlely need 64 bit codecs for vista 64 (ffdshow has a 64 bit experimental pack out now that has been working great) but there is ONE MORE DETAIL - you can't let wmp get new codecs. For some reason, that causes the error message (I'd be interested if someone could tell me why, but it just does). So anyways, go to media player, go to tools, options, player, and UNclick 'download codecs automatically'. I hope this saves some of you out there the mess I just went through...

lol.

I have the Vista Codec Package for Vista and the x64 extensions that shark007 wrote - and WiMP is set to download codecs automatically.

And I have been watching Eureka 7 (anime) for the last 3 hours in WMC on my x64 machine without an issue.

Forget all other codec packages - use the VCP FTW.