Vista - .avi Thumbnail Preview

Help,

When I view video files with windows explorer I no longer see a thumbnail
preview, just an icon. I have the correct box unchecked in "folder and
serach options" with regard to thumbnails. My fear is that I may have
inadvertantly changed a registry setting a while back when I was working on
another issue or trying to increase speed. (I am by no means an expert at
regedit.) I do see thumbnail previews for other file types. I believe the
problem is isolated to just .avi and possibly .mpg files. An help would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jody

There could be a number of causes that will result in this problem.

The simplest is this: Is the folder customized to display "Pictures and Videos"? Do this by right-clicking on the folder, then selct Customize. Under Use this folder type as a template, select Pictures and Videos.

Another possible cause are codecs. Have you recently installed/uninstalled codec packages? I've had the experience also that even if the file can play in Media Player, I didn't always get thumbnails. I rooted my experience down to codecs, and when I removed all codec packages, and re-installed a single package (for x64), my thumbnails returned.

I currently use this codec package: Vista Codec Package Homepage

My folder is customized to display "pictures and videos" I do have codec
packages installed, however I do not think I made any recent changes or
installed any different ones. I will try as you suggested however and
uninstall all of them and then install 1 single package.

I still believe my problem lies in the registry. I do see thumbnails for
existing avi files that were present in the folder for a lengthy time.
However, all new files that I download do not generate thumbnails. I think
this may be linked to an indexing problem. Even though the folder location
is an indexed location and the file type is checked, if i search for the
title of a know avi file from the start menu I get no results. I have
already tried rebuilding the index.

Jody

"dzomlija" <dzomlija.2wcfl6@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net> wrote in message
news:dzomlija.2wcfl6@xxxxxx-mx.forums.net...

While anything is possible, I don't think it'll be indexing that is the problem here.

Existing files show thumbnails, but new ones don't? The more you mention, the less it's a registry problem and more of codecs.

I'll check for other possibilities too, and will keep you up to speed. In the meantime, let me know how the codec change works out?