WMP does not play avi video

churin said:

I just installed W7 RC(7100) on two different laptop PCs and noticed WMP on both machine can not play avi video(both play audio parts). I thought W7 supports avi. What could be wrong?

AVI is a container format not a video format. Your video contains a non-standard stream format. I NEVER recommend codec packs for Windows 7 because it's native handling is so advanced and you never know how some of these codec packs are going to damage your system as they were not designed for it.

I would recommend downloading avidemux, it's free and can convert almost anything to standard formats. Get it here http://avidemux.razorbyte.com.au/bin....4.4_win32.exe and convert your video to mpeg4 avc (h.264) in an mp4 container. I can post a tutorial on how to do this if there is a need.

churin said:

W7 7068 on my desktop machine plays avi including its video without any third party codec installed. I think build 7000 also played avi.

I'll wager that the avi files you are playing are not the exact same ones you tried in previous versions.

churin said:

You are right. I did not know there are two different kind of files though both video files share the same AVI extension. The one which cannot be played is the one which was created by a video capture software. The WMP which can play it is on an OS where that video capture software is installed. It appears confusing since both types of video files share the same extension.
Does the video editor referred to in your post convert this kind of file with avi extensin to the type of avi file which typically created by digital camera?

Yes. The type of AVI file most commonly created by a digital camera is known as MJPEG or motion JPEG. avidemux will read that and create a standard h.264 encoded .mp4 file that will retain almost all the quality at a fraction of the size. most standard definition movies I have run about 350MB. I'd try to transition away from AVI now that you have a modern OS that's more standards based. MP4 containers are what you want to look for with video encoded with either mpeg4 asp or avc.

churin said:

I noticed that WMP on W7 supports MP4 which previously required QuickTime. I am using a video converter called "MPEG4 Direct Maker" to convert that problem avi file to MP4 format.
Thank you for enlightening me about avi file.

Did you notice that WMP on Win7 also supports QuackTime .mov files natively as well?

OTOH, I fully support the Shark007.net - Windows 7 Codecs by Shark007 b/c they work.

incidentally, one of the formats that also uses the .AVI container although the codec is proprietary is DivX - and the Codec Pack works just fine.

In opposition to Baarod's comments, I prefer being able to play files in their native codec format as opposed to having to convert them to another format - hence my desire for a codec pack. The *only* pack I trust is the one I mentioned above b/c it is basically a collection of tools from around the Internet all of which have been tailored to work with native video and audio playback in Windows 7. It's not perfect by any means (e.g. FLAC audio in WiMP plays perfectly fine - except for the seek bar not moving at all), but it works without having to do a lot of conversion.

My main aversion to converting videos is that codecs compress the video, and often with loss - and converting from one format to another will almost always result in *some* clarity loss of some type. however, if this is what you prefer, then AVIDemux is pretty much the way to go - either that or MediaCoder.

johngalt said:

OTOH, I fully support the Shark007.net - Windows 7 Codecs by Shark007 b/c they work.

incidentally, one of the formats that also uses the .AVI container although the codec is proprietary is DivX - and the Codec Pack works just fine.

No codec pack needed for DivX or Xvid. Although the DivX encoder is closed source and proprietary it creates streams that are mpeg4 asp compatible so Windows 7 can play them natively as long as someone didn't cram those compatible streams into some hacked container. Usually DivX avis play A-OK on Windows 7. If they don't you can usually copy the stream into a mp4 container and be good to go.

johngalt said:

In opposition to Baarod's comments, I prefer being able to play files in their native codec format as opposed to having to convert them to another format - hence my desire for a codec pack.

I don't believe we're in opposition at all, John. I too prefer to play files in their native format as well. It's just that I've found that Windows 7 handles almost all of them without codec packs as long as the container that the stream is in is recognized by Windows 7. That's not always the case so I advocate using avidemux generally for repackaging streams from funky containers into standardized, Windows 7 friendly containers. That's a stream copy not a re-encode and as such is fast and lossless.

johngalt said:

The *only* pack I trust is the one I mentioned above b/c it is basically a collection of tools from around the Internet all of which have been tailored to work with native video and audio playback in Windows 7.

Not exactly, it still sits on the old XP directshow layer. To be "n tailored to work with native video and audio playback in Windows 7" it would have to work with Media Foundation. And it does not.

johngalt said:

It's not perfect by any means (e.g. FLAC audio in WiMP plays perfectly fine - except for the seek bar not moving at all), but it works without having to do a lot of conversion.

My main aversion to converting videos is that codecs compress the video, and often with loss - and converting from one format to another will almost always result in *some* clarity loss of some type. however, if this is what you prefer, then AVIDemux is pretty much the way to go - either that or MediaCoder.

As I've been trying to get across in this and many other posts I'm not fan of recompressing pre-compressed content either. My research and experience have shown that a vast majority of unplayable content is Windows 7 is simply packaged in a bad container while the content streams themselves are entirely playable had they been contained sensibly. My recommended use for avidemux is simply to use it in stream copy mode to put playable content from unplayable containers into a container that Windows 7 supports.