What happens when installing the K-Lite Codec Pack

Sonata wrote on 7/24/2009, 10:51 AM
I need to edit .mp4 files with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

After doing some research, it appears that Movie Studio can't do it on its own without the K-Lite Codec Pack installed.

Right now I use the "Make Movie" wizard to render a movie to put onto DVD, and I am completely satisfied with the quality of the codec used.

When I install the codec pack, is the same codec which has been used all along to render using the Make Movie wizard still used, or am I going to find more options and possibly mess with the quality I am getting; I don't want to break anything in the process.

I just want to be very cautious before I do anything. I could just install the codec pack and see what happens, but I am not comfortable experimenting at this point.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 7/24/2009, 1:09 PM
Vegas can do MP4 without any other codec pack. It's using either Quicktime to decode these, or MainConcept. So you just make sure you have Quicktime installed and that's all you need.
Sonata wrote on 7/24/2009, 2:43 PM
Okay, more information:

I just created a video in Movie Studio and exported as .mp4. Brought the new .mp4 into Movie Studio and it works just fine!

The difference among the .mp4's, then, is that the ones I need to work with are from YouTube. They are family movies I have on YT which I have downloaded the .mp4 version directly from my YT account. These YT movies were made originally with Movie Studio, uploaded to YT, I didn't save the original .wmv exports, so I downloaded the .mp4 files from YT.

Why do the YT mp4's not work* but the directly-from-Vegas mp4's work perfectly?

*By "don't work," I mean the video gets stuck like a broken record and replays a few frames for several seconds, the audio is off, there are green squares where there should be solid colors, and there are pixelated portions near the bottom of the video.
Eugenia wrote on 7/24/2009, 3:04 PM
I actually get a crash when trying to playback HD Youtube .mp4 ripped files from either Platinum 9 or Pro 8. The non-HD files don't crash, and they work fine as far as I can tell.

However, on thing you can try is rename the files as .MOV, so you can force Vegas' quicktime decoder to decode them rather than MainConcept (Vegas has two h.264 decoders you see, if one doesn't work properly, the other one might).
Terry Esslinger wrote on 7/24/2009, 11:45 PM
A question along this line.
I have found the codecs in Vegas Pro to work fine. However for some stupid reason I downloaded and installed the K=lite codec pak. Have these codecs now automatically replaced the Vegas codecs? Should I uninstall K-lite and Vegas and reinstall Vegas? Or should I just cruise along and see what happens?
Eugenia wrote on 7/25/2009, 1:08 AM
No, they don't overwrite Vegas' codecs. Vegas first looks at its own codecs and if it can't find a decoder, only then it looks for others.
Richard Jones wrote on 7/25/2009, 3:08 AM
Silly question I suspect so forgive me but my brain's hurting after playing around with various Codecs when trying to use the Firefox DownLoad and Conversion options over the past week or so!

1. Am I right that the K-Lite Codecs are availablefor for use outide Vegas (I guess they must be)?

2. If so, can they be attached to videos downloaded to the Hard Drive so that these can be played on the PC if the original codec attached to the download is not already installed?

3. How easy is this or does the K-Lite codec apply itself automatically when you want to play the download?

4. And, finally, is there a way of discovering what codecs you already have installed?

Richard
Richard Jones wrote on 7/28/2009, 3:07 AM
Anyone?

Incidentally I read in another forum that "the problem with K-Lite is that it blindly installs all kinds of components (not just codecs), many of which are not compatible with each other. And it does not uninstall cleanly."

Perhaps K-Lite is not such a good option after all!

Richard
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 7/28/2009, 7:10 AM
You can always turn back windows one day, if you have issues.

YouTube videos aren't meant to be re-edited. They are bound to give you many headaches and waste of time. Also, Vegas wasn't created for this kind of editing. Instead, why don't you use Youtube's editing feature (online) instead?
Sonata wrote on 7/28/2009, 8:42 AM
When I took footage to make the videos to upload to YT, I didn't save the files because they were too huge for my aging hard drive. I have saved the .mp4 versions because they are much smaller and will play on any computer, and I have them as a back up in case YT goes belly up.

However, I have realized that I really like my work I created while making YT videos, compared to the boring original footage of the home movies, so I thought I would put each of the YT videos onto a DVD to watch as a regular DVD.

As far as I know, I can't bring the videos into DVDA as .mp4 files and expect to prepare into MPEG-2, so I thought I would edit/render them in Vegas first.

I will probably just scrap the project and hang on to the mp4 files and if I ever get a TV with computer inputs, I can play them on the TV that way through the computer.
Sonata wrote on 8/6/2009, 5:53 AM
I took the same .mp4 files that didn't work with VMS9 and brought them into NeroVision Express 3 and they work perfectly and I was able to make a wonderful DVD using the Nero application.

But NeroVE3 is ancient (ca. 2005) compared to VMS9, so why did it work? Does Nero have its own set of codecs that VMS9 can't use? Can I get VMS9 to use those codecs in the future?