Vista Won’t Play .AVI Files ? This Solution Might Work!
Nov 20, 2007 Computer and Internet, Miscellany
AVI Files won’t work on Visa? Doesn’t that sound stupid when that’s the most popular one!
I racked 8 days trying to figure that out.
I spent times loading this codec pack, that codec pack and I had a bunches of codec pack Hoping all would do it.
Then I looked around in every vista forums out there. Some said; your video is corrupted. Some suggest download more codecs; go here; go there. Some suggested, VISTA sucks so go get a XP or get rid of your old camcorder.
When your videos are in avi (which by the way is the most popular and widely used format and most of our budget camcorders record in .avi format perhaps with xvid codec in it or may be I am wrong. Mine is Point and Shoot by Pure Digital, works great – small in size, 30 frames per second and upto Records 4000KB Data Rate and it’s so easy even kids can use it. It records in xvid format with file extension .avi)
When Vista Gave up I couldn’t make any videos for youtube for almost a week and thought for few hours everyday that I should replace VISTA with XP.
I experimented with some trial versions such as Ulead Studio and Adobe Premier Element 4 and many others hoping that I could some how manage to make a video without using Windows Movie Maker. But all those software were too big for my system and on my wallet too….. And, today, out of the blue, here came the solution and I hope some of these might be useful to you.
Follow these steps and let me know if it works.
Please note this first:
****************
First Thing, don’t make the mistake as I did: Download bunches of codecs hoping all will work. When you are frustrated, you forget what kind of codecs they are? do they come with virus, spyware, adware? Are they for windows vista 64 bits or the 32 bit like our Windows Home Premium. Anyways, DONOT download BUNCHES codecs hoping it’s gonna fix everything!!!!! Also don’t run Registry Cleaner etc hoping that’s why you can’t watch .avi files. Microsoft says VISTA doesn’t need that. LOL! (I learned that after I actually screwed up, ran some from one from Windows Hall of Fame Shareware>, Now, Don’t make the mistake I did! **
Follow these steps :
1. You sure have Movie Maker That comes with your Vista Home Premium. If not, install that if you are going to make movies.
2. Download the Media Player 11, See if you can play any .avi files. If not, don’t panic yet. What makes me wonder is that Microsoft says Media Player 11 for XP not for VISTA. But they do recommend using it on VISTA, is there a catch ? I don’t see it though. It works. If this media player doesn’t work. Just leave it there. Go make yourself a nice cup of tea or listen to a music. Turn off the computer, or go a nice walk, take some pictures of trees,leaves and the color of fall… LOL! but I did it!
3. Then, Download a free program called VirtualDub, it runs great on VISTA too! It’s free, It’s not all that complicated as many people say it as . You can use this even to edit a video such as cut and paste part of the a video as well as convert it to other formats. You might actually enjoy this program as you slowly understand the concept of editing, saving videos in other formats and so on. Now on virtualdub, you can see your video. Hurray! Finally you can watch your .avi video here!
4. Download another free Video Player from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html (You can watch your videos again. If you have been going insane like me for a week trying to play .avi on so called the latest operating system of all time!! VISTA ?), just watching videos even without the sounds (that’s what happened to me for a few videos) at times still feels good. So keep the program, it’s nice and the site has tons of support, if you need.
5. By now, you should be able to watch some of your .avi videos
6. Now Install xvid codec from http://www.xvid.org/ (I am note sure if this is needed, but I did it. Actually, I had done this in the first place of my troubleshooting but nothing happened. But after doing all that above steps and installing this one, it seems to go with the step; read the last part)
7. I am 100% sure this last step (#7) made everything happen, but again, I could be wrong. I am now able to import .avi files in movie maker, watch movies in windows media player and all. What’s the step? Download Windows Media Encoder. I think It actually installed the necessary codecs.
8. Now goto your movie maker and import all your .avi files and hope it works for you.
I am not really a geek, just sharing my experience with you.
I see that Google’s search results show an increasing number of pages on (1) .avi on vista not working/opening, and (2) Unable to Install quicktime and itunes on windows. It’s a shame that such two big giant leaders of the tech create products to leave their users with to waste their time; none have actually designed utilities and tools for “user’s peace of mind” rather creating more problems another industry to mushroom; Do a search for repair vista, repair registry, repair, uninstall quicktime and so on and see how many results you see for solutions and softwares that claim to do that. There is again another problem with QuickTime for Windows. Before you reinstall QuickTime on windows, you need to uninstall it and often it won’t uninstall with it’s uninstall package, so you are left with a list of steps to follow; wasting your time and energy and again there is no guarantee that it will work. Anyways, we know, There is a physical war in the world. I hope that Microsoft and Apple shake *FIRM* hands in keeping PEACE in Tech World.
Some Tips : If you installed bunches of codecs on your system, remember some of them don’t come with “uninstall” features. If you delete the files manually their entries might still be on the windows registry making media players crash or even not work. I had to remove registry entry one by one and there were like 100s of them there, some registry entry keys were there without pointing to any files on the computer, I guess they were trying to point to the moon!! LOL!
I Hope this helps if you are having similar problem like mine.
If I can be of any help to you, please comment. I will try my best to respond as soon as possible.
See ya and the new video should be up on my channel, and if you like, please subscribe to the channel, I would very much appreciate it!
The channel is http://www.youtube.com/k6yardotcom
Take care!
–Ruben
***When a PC boots, say a little prayer… “Lord, give PC to give me Peace!”
November 25th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Yes you will need xvid. I installed “windows media bla bla”, and no video either. After xvid everything worked fine.
Thank you for this advice and thanks to google that your site was the first choice to my question.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I am glad it helped you. But there are still issues with windows movie maker crashing and blames xvid team which can be seen control panel: programs and solutions or something like that. I could watch videos but couldn’t publish the movie from movie maker.
It had become increasingly difficult to find solutions to fix problems on vista. First which one to blame? Vista or the codec maker or software maker. Using google’s advance search gives some help; examples
xvid vista problem site:microsoft.com
vista problem site:xvid.org
xvid vista site:apple.com
Having tried all those it has helped learn a lot and be happy that I am not the only user facing this xvid horror. Still looking for solution, perhaps I need to buy video converter. With vista, investment goes up but you do seem to lose your peace of mind and time. Is vista making people go for mac? Doesn’t microsoft care about its users. Look for solutions about xvid on Microsoft site. It has much older posts, less posts while other forums are active and trying hard to solve issues with vista. Now, go figure!
November 27th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
After 3 weeks of trouble-shooting, I have realized that it’s simply a waste of time trying to make windows vista run xvid files. today movie will work, tomorrow it won’t, part of it show-up, then computer will crash. perhaps your movie maker imports them fine but it crashes when you are publishing. It’s all none sense. If you do have time, waste it! LOL! a few days back I installed codecs from CCP-project.net, it didn’t help me nor did the forum. I am not blaming everyone, but blaming for not having enough knowledge about technology. So It seems before we go buy our video recording device, we read the spec. Which one do you recommend guys? After all this xvid nonsense on vista, i have two choice; go for another camcorder that records in QuickTime or buy Imac. The later is too much for my budget. I got rid of the movie maker icon, installed Adobe Premier Element 4.0 when a guy over the phone said it can nicely run on 1GB (He lied to me! I bought it, it crashes a lot, and electronic downloads are none returnable, I guess…) but I am still able to work with it. Hopefully when I add more RAM it might work well. The program takes a while to get used to but has loads of features; that’s nice for a $99 bucks.
Not to confuse you any more, download this shareware program which is my FAV.
http://www.imtoo.com/mpeg-encoder.html
In shareware mode, it can encode upto 5 minutes only and you can use it as long as you want and the beauty is : it works like a charm. After trying out various codecs, some of the programs now don’t work such as Virtualdub, even VPlayer. Some codec must have removed even the VISTA’s audio codec… I am missing a sound codec for my xvid file ? Enough about trying to fix!
Do yourself a favour, download that program, download quick time, now convert .avi to .mov and hurray!
You might need to check the bitrate of your .avi file (right click->properties, bitrate) and not use the auto features to get better results. If you need help, comment.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:05 am
You rock dude… thanx a ton for this blog. i lost hope long back, i have a desk top with Win 2000 just for movies… now i can throw it away… good researsh.. keep it up
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Okay, i was wondering if you could help me, i too have vista on my Compaq labtop. I haaving a troubled tiw with trying pay an .avi file myself too. The problem is, whenever i open up the filewhich is the movie Heathers in Windows Media Player it makes a like screeching sound and there is no movie just swirly designs, i have the Windows Media Encoder(9) and the DivX Codec installed.Im only fourteen and pretty mutch clueless when it comes down to technical situations like this and i was wondering ifyou could help me with my situation? Sny help would be much appriciated!
July 25th, 2008 at 8:42 am
.avi movie files could have been recorded using varrios codecs such as the open source xvid. Google “VLC player”, download it and see if it can play your video. There is also a free nice utility which can tell a lot about a video including size, audio codecs etc. Just download gspot and open your video file. Comment on what video codec it says your video has. I will try to help. Also see if there is any help on this site: http://www.guidetowindowsvista.com/
Hope you get to watch your video.
— Ruben
July 25th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
OMGSH! IT WORKS! Thank you so much. The VLD player did the trick.*thumbs up*!Im so happy noW.THANK YOU!
July 25th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Okay..SRY for the doub ke post but it worked for to of my movies but when i attempted to watch my Heathers torrent in the vcl player there is no picture and sound and the bar that shows how far along you are in the movie just moves unusualy fast, ive dried acouple different versions of this torrent bun none suprisingly work yet my elvira torrents work and rtheir all in .avi format.Do you have any ideas?
July 27th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
look for help on the forum of vlc player site, did u try gspot? Google it, download, run and open your video file. Tell me which codec the video file has. Try divx’s free version. It also has been known to fix problems related to our topic.
If nothing works, try converting video to other format such as QuickTime. You can download QuickTime player for free.
let me how it goes. I suggest you read the steps on converting if that helps.
– Ruben
August 27th, 2008 at 12:22 am
D8 will this work with the XP as well?
October 4th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I am sorry, I didn’t understand what you meant by D8 ?
March 1st, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Thanx dude!..i was getting pissed off not having my movie maker. since its what i love to do,
http://www.youtube.com/thakosis
http://www.myspace.com/freakinawesomeproductions
all i did was downlaod the Encoder, and WALAHH… it worked
thanx
December 21st, 2009 at 7:28 am
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