Windows media player and DivX

clink wrote on 1/25/2003, 9:10 PM
I have been trying to encode with Xvid and Divx. Had problems opening Xvid projects in VV-would get black screens or no video at all. I changed the fourcc code from Xvid to Div50 and that did the trick.

Problem now is that I prefer to use the DivX 5 codec which coincidentally is not playing well on my Windows media player. I installed DivX player 2 alpha which plays DivX files great (A/v sync problems with WMP).

I have noticed that when I install the DivX player VV again does not recognize DivX or Xvid video streams-only audio. Uninstall the DivX player and VV recognizes them.

Is there something inherent in VV causing this-if so can I correct it? Or, is there an alternate solution?

Comments

mikkie wrote on 1/26/2003, 8:59 AM
Can't address your question directly, but maybe something here is similar enough to help.

From my experience & what I've read here, the beta does effect winmedia at least, but that usually goes away after a reboot. I (perhaps alone) suffered & am still suffering from a lot of video stuff that needs reinstalled as I come across it after installing the beta. I'm going to guess that whatever happened to me was more then registry & windows files related -> I have a dual boot system sharing the same install of most software, & last night I found I had to reinstall one of the DVD players in win98 SE, even though the Beta's confined to XP pro.

Some DX & Active X stuff I've been able to save by re-registering the files, often with regdrop.exe, which only takes a few seconds. Not everything may be cureable. Trying to restore vob file drag and drop to mediaplayer, I did find a few puzzling things -- could only get media player to play vob files by forcing it in the file types dialog of windows explorer. Doing it the right way I could open and play them, but not directly play. Haven't figured out what's going on there yet, but as it's one of those things that was nice but not mission critical, haven't spent a great deal more time on it.

I did find that I could go into the registry and change one key for Vegas to allow it to recognize the vob file format, but that wouldn't do you much good as if I'm not mistaken Vegas recognized DiVX as a separate codec.

One thing that might work if reinstalling DiVX doesn't, as you can change the header to Div50, *might* be able to tell windows to use the Div50 code for all DiVX related files. Depending on your version of windows, might be a workable pain in the butt to create two .reg files -> double click one to set windows to use the Div50 header for everything DiVX, & another to put things back.

mike
discdude wrote on 1/26/2003, 10:14 AM
Clink, XviD works now!!!

Check out this thread (which should be very familiar to you):
http://www.xvid.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=4801

AFAIK, this fix is not in the stable 0.9.0 branch but in the dev-api-3 branch. So you can't download the snapshot, you have to use CVS to checkout the files. This probably means that it will be awhile before the fix makes its way into the Nimo Pack, etc.

Big shout out to Pete over at XviD who listened to our whining. He did put the blame on Vegas:

" ... when queried, xvid returns YUY2 at the default colorspace format. vegas v3 always uses the default value, however it only supports RGB 16/24/32-bit colorspaces. thus you get a black screen, or none at all."

Personally, I find it strange that Vegas doesn't support YUV colorspaces since so many capture devices and codecs prefer that colorspace or use it internally (bt8x8 capture chips, MPEG, DV, XviD, etc). It'll be wonderful if a SF tech could take a break from working on Vegas 4 and elaborate on Vegas' support of YUV colorspaces.
mikkie wrote on 1/27/2003, 9:55 AM
Explains *why* we have to set huffyuv to force rgb for Vegas to handle it... Might also explain a few other prob.

Thanks
mike
discdude wrote on 1/27/2003, 12:01 PM
Are you talking about the "Always Suggest RBG Format for Output" checkbox in the codec configuration dialog? I've always had that unchecked and it has always worked fine with Video Factory.

Then again, several other apps have had trouble with HuffYUV (Flash comes to mind). Maybe I should have that option checked.

Nevertheless, all codecs are now working for me in Video Factory and the Vegas 4 beta so I'm happy.

Still, it would be nice if a SF Tech could comment on this.

On a related note, have you ever taken a look at the source code for HuffYUV? There are a lot of workarounds for working with Premiere and AfterFX.
clink wrote on 1/27/2003, 7:44 PM
I found a player, BSPlayer, that doesn't interfere at all. Got it all working now. Thanks for the info on the Xvid discdude.