Vista - Media Player 11 won't plan MPG files

I recently bought a new Compaq Presario with Vista for my wife. I
transferred some mpg files to it from this computer (XP) and tried to play
them. A 9 minute file screeches through in about one second with only a
weird audio noise like a robot talking into a tin can, and no video at all.
So I installed GomPlayer on her computer and it plays the files perfectly.
What do I need to do to get Media Player to play mpg files??

Ted Smith

On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:23:30 -0500, "Ted Smith" <me@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Pray.

Yes, Media Player is that bad. The problem with Media Player is even
if you have a suitable CODEC on your system that can play the file, it
often doesn't. If it does open the file it can start to play it then
five minutes into the vid, it might say it can't play it... and it
needs to shutdown. Then you might get Com Surrgate errors, or only the
video portion plays, no audio, or the audio is OK, but you get garbled
video or you have it set to repeat and the second time around the
video is nothing but a series of horizontal lines or the picture
becomes a negative or plays upside down.

As you already discovered GOM Player has no problems with most video
files. Two other good players also free are XnView and VLC Media
Player. All of these will at least attempt to play damaged or
corrupted files. A obvious feature. The idiots of Redmond deliberately
designed Media Player to give up if everything isn't pristine, then a
certain MS employee comes in here and tries to blame the video if
their player can't tame it, ignoring that just about any other player
can play it without issue.

That's like blaming the bread if your toaster burns the toast.

Some like to try to paint me as a Microsoft basher. No, I know how
things are suppose to work, and the fanboy crowd can't bare to hear
how often Microsoft screws things up.

"Ringmaster" <bigtop@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mv5g64pleq3b8dok6590cf7juhc1bs8r4a@xxxxxxSuch as? Any good VFW/DShow/MF codec should work fine. I can think of
three bad codecs that won't work, but I'm curious as to the specifics of
what you're alluding to. If there's an actual problem (as opposed to codec
design issues), I'd be curious to hear it.
What are the fault details on those two crashes? Those would likely pretty
clearly be errors in bad third party codecs. This is a problem for any
application that lets you load other filter or plug-ins, but the source of
the problem would lie outside the player. Please post up the fault
details--
http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html#bucket
and I'll look into it.

Most of those are pretty straight-forward to resolve - the primary cause is
usually broken codec packages that are years out of date and still
distributing garbage versions of old old codecs. Especially given that COM
Surrogate errors are pretty explicitly not Windows Media related: COM
Surrogate exists to host codecs so that they crash themselves and not your
system.
A: What 'no audio' problems do you have? AC3 audio or what?
The most likely cause of 'no audio' was fixed in SP1. If there's something
else, that's interesting.
B: Garbled video is weird - how do you end up having this problem? The
player has a general rendering system: I'd be curious as to how you manage
to get garbled video out of it, if it's unique to that codec or whatnot - if
it's something you can reproduce on another system, that potentially
provides data to help identify whatever issue you're referring to.
There's problems in most any software: the question and difficulty is in
precisely identifying them. When people supply adequate information, it's
usually possible to fix up Microsoft problems or even problems in other
software (through passing word along). But the above generic comments
really don't translate to any specifics and thus are pretty sadly useless.

I like helping you. You may like Microsoft, you may hate Microsoft: it's
all fairly irrelevant to me: I just enjoy helping improve software. =)

-Z
--
Speaking for myself only.
See http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html for some helpful WMP info.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Does it work correctly on a different Vista computer? I'm curious if this
is something unique about the file or something about the system.

Do other MPEG files play back correctly on her system?

--
Speaking for myself only.
See http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html for some helpful WMP info.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
--
"Ted Smith" <me@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e%23V%23Hbj2IHA.4004@xxxxxx