Vista - Windows Movie Maker Vids - Audio but Black Screen

Hey, I'm really confused and have googled for hours on a solution but I'm so tired I decided to just make a post on it hoping somebody would help me.

I was asking one of my friends and they recommended this place for me, so here I am.


The problem seems to be with my .avi videos when I put them on Windows Movie Maker. They're videos i spend days downloading for an AMV that I downloaded from Vuze recently, and they seem to work fine with anything apart from WMM and Windows DVD Maker (But windows DVD maker is a diff issue anyway that I wont address here).

I've tried all sorts of things. I unticked "AVI DVD Compressor" because when I left it ticked, whenever I tried moving .AVI vids to the timeline it would just say "Windows Movie Maker Has Stopped Working" and close the whole thing. But unticking it got me atleast somewhere, but now I face yet another problem.

When I try to play my videos (timelines or not), the audio only comes and the video is replaced with a transfixed black screen. I've tried all sorts of codecs and what not, and I'm totally lost now. I dont know what's wrong, but was wondering if anyone could help me.

Im not too good with Compressors, Decompressors and Codecs and what have you, but given the instructions I'm good at following them, and hope to be able to make videos properly soon with my .avi videos.

Oh, and I dont want to convert them because that just makes the quality worse, as .AVI videos give the best playback quality for me.

Thanks alot,
_xShafski

It sounds to me like you have symptoms of too many codecs installed. People tend to throw codec packs into PC's and hope that one of them will work....instead the codecs cause conflicts.

.AVI is a container wrapper...it's an extension that can be given to any video compressed with any of the codecs in use today....so AVI can be any of the 800+ flavours.

The trick is to find out which codec was used for the video you downloaded off the net... I'm not going to try and guess which it is but there are programs available to work it out.

Once you have worked it out, install only the codec needed and everything should work.

Hm, are you sure? Because why will they play on windows media play but not WMM; isn't the same codecs used with both? Apart from AVI Decompressor which I unfiltered as stated before.

My vid was downloaded from Azureus Vuze, a torrent downloaded, but im finding it hard to find which codec is right and I'm getting confused

Anybody got any suggestions or help?

This is what i use for codec's. all most every movie on torrents sites uses one of these formats

heres the links for dl.


Mpeg-4 ~ http://www.koepi.info/Xvid-1.2.1-04122008.exe


Divx ~ http://www.divx.com/downloads/divx

ac3 ~ SourceForge.net: AC3Filter: Downloading ...

i am having the same problem, BUT i _did_not_ download any codecs.
heck, i don't even know what those are. anyhoo, none of my videos from
my Flip Camcorder will show up on ANY movie maker. it's just a blank
screen with just audio. help ppl!!!!!


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Pingo
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One is a player and the other is an editor...different beasts.

Even on my pro-sumer editor I occasionally come across similar situations...plays in WINDVD or WMC but put it in an editor and it won't play.

Just to be on the safe side though make sure you have the latest MS DirectX (march 2009) installed....this might help

I think the easiest would be to convert the video format to .wmv using the free Format Factory ( Format Factory - Free media file format converter ). Since .wmv is the "native" Vista format, you avoid all problems.

whs;4586814 Wrote:yeah but i tried using format factory and changing it to .wmv--does not
work. well it worked for the first one but all the other ones? nope.

I hope I'm not kicking around a dead topic here. But I am basically
having the exact same problem.

I had no codecs installed as my computer was brand new. The file
imported without any problems, but try and play a clip and you get the
audio but no picture. I did eventually download a "K-lite" codec pack
which allowed me to play .avi on windows media player. But it didn't
effect Windows movie maker at all.

Is there another video editing program that anyone can recommend that
will perhaps not have this problem?

Windows Movie Maker works best with the .wmv filetype. The easiest is to use Format Factory ( Format Factory - Free media file format converter ) and convert your clips. Format Factory does a high quality job and it is free and easy to use.
You should be aware that you have a considerable loss of quality when you edit with WMM. That is why I use Machete ( Lossless Video and Audio Editor (splitter,joiner) for AVI,FLV,WMV,WMA,ASF,MP3 files ) which sell for $19.95 (lifetime license). There the output is exactly like the input. You can try it for free for 2 weeks and see whether you like it.