I've read a few posts now and then re: windows media player (and hence windows) won't play this type of file or another (often mpg1/2). There've been problems where video files won't open or behave properly in Vegas (or some other app) - might well have a place in the print to tape problems some experience. And there's always the ever popular: Vegas install broke whatever on my machine so these videos no longer play...
Not going to claim there's any one answer, but hopefully supply a direction one might pursue in getting things to work properly, or at least in some sane fashion. Most of this is from my own experience, and where I've read related information, it's been passed along with the same sort of disclaimer - this is not ironclad nor official or any of that.
First off, an excellent source for info and fixes is here: http://www.nwlink.com/~zachd/ - go to the FAQ page. About the only thing from that FAQ I'll paraphrase here is that in practice, wmplayer and in essence windows and the software operating within it, will use Active X components in what appears at first to be a very random fashion, and this is the source of *many* a problem.
Windows has available to it all of the Active X controls/filters that have been installed, unfortunately without the sort of guidelines that say use this here - *only*; instead it has this pool of filters that don't always get along with each other. When wmplayer opens a media file, usually video, instead of picking just the one best tool to use, it tries to use any and all that fit. A fair comparison would be picking up a handful of screwdrivers, and trying to use them all at the same time to loosen a screw, NOT trying them one at a time to see which fits best.
Of course only one screwdriver can fit into the screw head at one time, so the first one that fits (sort of?) is the one that does the turning. And don't forget, you've got all these other screwdrivers in your hand at the same time, and that has quite an effect on how well you can use the one screwdriver that got lucky so-to-speak.
In very much the same way, the Active X filters on your PC interact, preventing others from working properly, or at all - even preventing them from installing in the first place!
As examples: Power DVD may not fully install, nor be recognized by winxp - separate player software may not work correctly or at all, like RealOne or the ATI Multimedia Center's File Player - Vegas (& other) video editors may not decode or encode video properly (or at all) - Active X filter &/or codec performance may be slowed dramatically - and of course whatever files may not play, &/or may not open in whatever applications.
There is a cure of sorts, one requiring a bit of work most often, and a few methods for achieving it. Most often seen is the recommendation to simply rename whatever files, in a trial and error fashion, until you find stuff working again (though unfortunately not the program that depended on that renamed file or file). When file versions conflict (i.e.: the MainConcept mpg1/2 codec is used by Roxio, Adobe, SOFO and so on), occasionally you can find one version that works with all of them, substituting files from one to another in a trial and error process.
What I personally prefer is to use these tools: Regdrop [http://www.addisonsw.com/regdrop.htm] - com register extension [http://www.xteq.com/products/comr/index.html] - Dxman [http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/dxman.htm]
Dxman is your window on the world of Active X on your PC - it shows you what's registered so that windows makes it active and available, and you can also remove whatever ones you want from the registry (where the active/inactive state is set). Using this software you can pick out a control or filter, find out which file it is, and where, and then remove it, hide it from windows so that it's no longer active - the file is still there.
Less is more, and so it goes with Active X & video files... Most often the cause of a problem is not that a control isn't active, but that too many of them are, and they are conflicting. If you can't play mpg1 or 2 files, remove mpg decoders - splitters - that sort of thing, testing playback each time, until things work. In extreme cases you might have to reinstall the desired program after most mpg1/2 related filters have been removed.
In any case, BEFORE you remove anything, note carefully the file name, location, and what the filter is supposed to do. Save a copy of your registry - & know how to restore it. In winxp at least, it doesn't hurt to fire up regedit first (from the run dialog), and export or save this key: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{{083863F1-70DE-11d0-BD40-00A0C911CE86}\Instance - it contains the Active X entries you remove with Dxman, &/or allows you to do the same thing manually.
So OK, you've removed whatever in Dxman, things work, but you've eliminated a bunch of stuff and you'd like at least some of it to work again... This is where the other 2 programs come in. Put a copy of Regdrop on your windows desktop, and drag any Active X files on top of it. Since you kept track of what you removed and where (you did, didn't you?), not a big deal using windows explorer to navigate to these files, then simply drag them one at a time over Regdrop & it will be registered with windows. If you encounter a dll file that regdrop doesn't do, after installing the com register extension you can right click on the file and choose: register library.
If you run into one that won't work this way (pretty rare in my experience), and if running the effected program doesn't re-register it for you, you might have to reinstall that program - unless you can restore the key in the registry with a backup. This is not intended as a registry tut, so I'll just say that it's possible to isolate & merge the one key you need in XP & possibly ME &/or 2k if you were able to save the key mentioned above. Otherwise, restoring the backup of your registry will put things back as they were, and you'll start over with Dxman, only with the last control you removed before things started working.
Trivia FWIW: I checked a few machines, some with different versions of windows, and never found 2 using the same decoder for mpg2 files (check properties in wmplayer with the file loaded).
Ligos decoders are VERY sticky... Several apps used to place/register these decoders in the windows system or system32 folder - may still - and removing these files will not turn something else on, rather it might just break your system further. The best way to handle this is to hunt up whatever versions you can, ones that are hopefully newer or older then the ones installed [codec or ripper packs and some dvd player software is a good place to look, but a lot of this is generally illegal or of questionable legality so I can't endorse it]. There are normally 3 files involved: lmpgad.ax - lmpgspl.ax - lmpgvd.ax ... Make copies of those files already installed, then copy over them with these other versions, doing so one file at a time, testing after each copy... The idea is that as these versions are most often incompatible with each other, you will hopefully break the ligos decoder by having 2 newer, and 1 older file (though it's trial and error as to what combo breaks) -> once that happens other codecs like the Mainconcept version with Vegas can take over. Once this happens, and you verify it in wmplayer clip properties, the Ligos files can be removed.
If your system is broke, installing other mpg1/2 codecs will not normally fix anything.
Hope this proves useful to some...
mike
Not going to claim there's any one answer, but hopefully supply a direction one might pursue in getting things to work properly, or at least in some sane fashion. Most of this is from my own experience, and where I've read related information, it's been passed along with the same sort of disclaimer - this is not ironclad nor official or any of that.
First off, an excellent source for info and fixes is here: http://www.nwlink.com/~zachd/ - go to the FAQ page. About the only thing from that FAQ I'll paraphrase here is that in practice, wmplayer and in essence windows and the software operating within it, will use Active X components in what appears at first to be a very random fashion, and this is the source of *many* a problem.
Windows has available to it all of the Active X controls/filters that have been installed, unfortunately without the sort of guidelines that say use this here - *only*; instead it has this pool of filters that don't always get along with each other. When wmplayer opens a media file, usually video, instead of picking just the one best tool to use, it tries to use any and all that fit. A fair comparison would be picking up a handful of screwdrivers, and trying to use them all at the same time to loosen a screw, NOT trying them one at a time to see which fits best.
Of course only one screwdriver can fit into the screw head at one time, so the first one that fits (sort of?) is the one that does the turning. And don't forget, you've got all these other screwdrivers in your hand at the same time, and that has quite an effect on how well you can use the one screwdriver that got lucky so-to-speak.
In very much the same way, the Active X filters on your PC interact, preventing others from working properly, or at all - even preventing them from installing in the first place!
As examples: Power DVD may not fully install, nor be recognized by winxp - separate player software may not work correctly or at all, like RealOne or the ATI Multimedia Center's File Player - Vegas (& other) video editors may not decode or encode video properly (or at all) - Active X filter &/or codec performance may be slowed dramatically - and of course whatever files may not play, &/or may not open in whatever applications.
There is a cure of sorts, one requiring a bit of work most often, and a few methods for achieving it. Most often seen is the recommendation to simply rename whatever files, in a trial and error fashion, until you find stuff working again (though unfortunately not the program that depended on that renamed file or file). When file versions conflict (i.e.: the MainConcept mpg1/2 codec is used by Roxio, Adobe, SOFO and so on), occasionally you can find one version that works with all of them, substituting files from one to another in a trial and error process.
What I personally prefer is to use these tools: Regdrop [http://www.addisonsw.com/regdrop.htm] - com register extension [http://www.xteq.com/products/comr/index.html] - Dxman [http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio/dxman.htm]
Dxman is your window on the world of Active X on your PC - it shows you what's registered so that windows makes it active and available, and you can also remove whatever ones you want from the registry (where the active/inactive state is set). Using this software you can pick out a control or filter, find out which file it is, and where, and then remove it, hide it from windows so that it's no longer active - the file is still there.
Less is more, and so it goes with Active X & video files... Most often the cause of a problem is not that a control isn't active, but that too many of them are, and they are conflicting. If you can't play mpg1 or 2 files, remove mpg decoders - splitters - that sort of thing, testing playback each time, until things work. In extreme cases you might have to reinstall the desired program after most mpg1/2 related filters have been removed.
In any case, BEFORE you remove anything, note carefully the file name, location, and what the filter is supposed to do. Save a copy of your registry - & know how to restore it. In winxp at least, it doesn't hurt to fire up regedit first (from the run dialog), and export or save this key: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{{083863F1-70DE-11d0-BD40-00A0C911CE86}\Instance - it contains the Active X entries you remove with Dxman, &/or allows you to do the same thing manually.
So OK, you've removed whatever in Dxman, things work, but you've eliminated a bunch of stuff and you'd like at least some of it to work again... This is where the other 2 programs come in. Put a copy of Regdrop on your windows desktop, and drag any Active X files on top of it. Since you kept track of what you removed and where (you did, didn't you?), not a big deal using windows explorer to navigate to these files, then simply drag them one at a time over Regdrop & it will be registered with windows. If you encounter a dll file that regdrop doesn't do, after installing the com register extension you can right click on the file and choose: register library.
If you run into one that won't work this way (pretty rare in my experience), and if running the effected program doesn't re-register it for you, you might have to reinstall that program - unless you can restore the key in the registry with a backup. This is not intended as a registry tut, so I'll just say that it's possible to isolate & merge the one key you need in XP & possibly ME &/or 2k if you were able to save the key mentioned above. Otherwise, restoring the backup of your registry will put things back as they were, and you'll start over with Dxman, only with the last control you removed before things started working.
Trivia FWIW: I checked a few machines, some with different versions of windows, and never found 2 using the same decoder for mpg2 files (check properties in wmplayer with the file loaded).
Ligos decoders are VERY sticky... Several apps used to place/register these decoders in the windows system or system32 folder - may still - and removing these files will not turn something else on, rather it might just break your system further. The best way to handle this is to hunt up whatever versions you can, ones that are hopefully newer or older then the ones installed [codec or ripper packs and some dvd player software is a good place to look, but a lot of this is generally illegal or of questionable legality so I can't endorse it]. There are normally 3 files involved: lmpgad.ax - lmpgspl.ax - lmpgvd.ax ... Make copies of those files already installed, then copy over them with these other versions, doing so one file at a time, testing after each copy... The idea is that as these versions are most often incompatible with each other, you will hopefully break the ligos decoder by having 2 newer, and 1 older file (though it's trial and error as to what combo breaks) -> once that happens other codecs like the Mainconcept version with Vegas can take over. Once this happens, and you verify it in wmplayer clip properties, the Ligos files can be removed.
If your system is broke, installing other mpg1/2 codecs will not normally fix anything.
Hope this proves useful to some...
mike