Windows Media Player and missing video files‏


  1. Posts : 9
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
       #1

    Windows Media Player and missing video files‏


    OK, I was prompted by Brink to write this post as a result of the thread regarding the tutorial 'How to Restore the Windows 7 Public Folders '. I'm hoping that someone may be able to offer a simple solution.

    I have set up a number of folders under the Public user in order to hold all my pictures, music and videos so that they may be automatically shared by any user that I create on my PC (or via a homegroup). This works fine for one user. However, for the other user, the videos are not visible in WMP. Previously, if I removed the public videos folder from the videos library and re-added it, they would show up; but they would disappear again if I closed an re-opened WMP. However, this no longer seems to happen since I rebuilt the public folders.

    Originally I thought that it may be related to me trying to rename the public folders to help distinguish them from the other folders of the same name within the libraries. However, as indicated in the above thread, this may well have been a red herring. (Although I did observe some other strange goings-on when I did this - such as Windows recreating folders with the missing names and backups failing because it could not find folders with names that did not exist).

    I did post on another forum and the suggestion was that it may be due to a corrupt user profile. The solution would be to create a third user, copy all of the files from the old to the new user then delete the old user (if it worked). As ever, this proved to be far from straight forward. I did try it, however. At first it appeared to work. WMP showed all the music, pictures and videos. However, after completing some more of the file copying, WMP then showed TWO copies of all of the pictures despite the shared folder only appearing once in the pictures library.
    Reading other threads, I get the impression that WMP has its own database in addition to simply reading files in the media libraries. (Is that correct?)
    Could it be that this has, somehow, been corrupted? Is there an easy way to force WMP to rebuild it?

    As I said, if the problems appears straightforward and the solution appears to be simple, I'm willing to try it. Otherwise, I believe that the effort involved in trying to fix it may well overwhelm the benefits. After all, I can always view the videos in the second user.

    Thanks, in advance, for any and all suggestions ...

    BR
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 9
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       #2

    Windows Media Player and missing video files‏ - solved!


    I did a bit of experimenting and managed to solve the problem. So, for anyone who may be interested, or who suffers similar problems in the future, this is how I solved it.

    First: a red herring. I found an option under the advanced tab under the Tools menu (which is normally hidden by default) to restore the media library 'Ah!', I thought, 'this looks just like what I need'. It looked as if it might have done the trick - but all the videos appeared TWICE.

    I then decided to try to find the WMP database. There appeared to be a number of possible files under C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player. I couldn't delete them because it said they were in use by WMP network sharing service or something like like. (I didn't know anyhting like that was switched on). However, I managed to delete them from within the admin user.

    On restarting WMP under the ordinary user again, it appeared to rebuild the WMP database files and I now have the correct results. So I am considering the matter closed.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 2
    Windows 7 Home x64
       #3

    this worked for me


    this was written for winXP but worked for me with win7
    Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files
      My Computer


 

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