Win XP Media Player - Won' t Play AVI

Draggon wrote on 11/14/2007, 6:18 AM
Sorry for the basic questions, but I'm in a bit of a hurry due to the unfortunate death of my MIL. I'm trying to finish a slideshow for the services on Friday... I searched the forums - admittedly rather quickly, but couldn't find an answer.

Anyway, I scanned a bunch of pictures at various resolutions in order to achieve a 1080 vertical resolution in anticipation of eventually (future date) burning the resulting video to (hopefully Blu Ray) HD disc. My immediate plans for the video are to display it on an LCD monitor from my laptop.

I rendered the slideshow as an AVI at 1920x1080 resolution, but I'm getting an error when I try to play it in Windows Media Player after it trys to "obtain the codec". It takes me to an MS website, but doesn't offer much in the way of what to do to solve the problem.

Alternatively, I rendered the slideshow in an M2T (?) format at 1440x1080 resolution. I changed the extension of the resulting file to MPG and played it successfully with Media Player, and it looks and sounds great. However, I set MP to loop the video, and the second pass is simply a black screen with no sound (timer advances from 0).

So, I'm looking for suggestions to either:

a. Render differently in a MediaPlayer-Friendly format that retains most of the resolution of the existing photos (1080 vertical).

b. Fix MediaPlayer to play the original AVI file.

or

c. Fix my MPG file, so that it loops properly in Media Player.

I really appreciate any help. I generally try to research my own problems until I find a solution, but I'm under the gun on this project and my quick attempts to resolve the issue have been unsuccessful.

Comments

rs170a wrote on 11/14/2007, 6:36 AM
Try a render to WMV-HD.
Media Player will like it and it'll loop for you.

Mike
GenJerDan wrote on 11/14/2007, 6:38 AM
When I installed...something...Vegas 8, maybe the newest Sorenson, who knows...AVIs stopped playing in WMP. (Played fine in Vegas, not in Sorenson, though.)

Upgrading to WMP 11 fixed it. If you're already there, or don't want WMP 11, maybe downgrade or uninstall what you have, then reinstall WMP.

I think it's just a matter of the system saying "XXX is the AVI codec to use", and WMP didn't ike it.
Draggon wrote on 11/15/2007, 5:23 AM

rs170a said:

Try a render to WMV-HD.

Thanks, Mike! Rendered as you suggested and am very satisfied with the results. 12 minute video took 3 hours, but the resulting file was less than a 10th the size of the MPG file I created. Seems like a nice codec (but I obviously know very little about this).