Discovery Gaming Community

Disco community, you are the sole communitiy that I trust and love. Today I have come to you with a problem which is slowly killing me.

So my Windows Media Player, ever since some point has stopped to work for me, everytime I try to launch it, it'll launch and then not responds thereafter. Same goes when I try to play a music or video file, the file would play but I can't click on any buttons because the damn thing is not responding. (effectively freezes on start up)

Recently, I downloaded and installed the latest WMP 11 in hope to fix this problem. And guess what? It worked right after I installed it. Today, I turned my computer on and double clicked on Taylor Swift - You belong with me, it opened and it stopped responding again...

So Disco, I need a solution. Please don't tell me to set my default player to something else or stop using it, because I like the fact that WMP launches relatively quickly and I can manage my music/adding album arts quite easily. Any tech guys here? Because everytime WMP opens, I die a little inside.

It sounds like it's a codec problem, and reinstalling WMP should take care of it, I'm surprised that it doesn't - check your sound card drivers.

If it is a codec problem, telling you to use a different player wouldn't actually do anything unless it's VLC or mplayer, neither of which have good library functions so I wouldn't recommend them anyway for music. (nearly every other player uses the directplay [system-wide, same as used by WMP] codecs, where mplayer and VLC use their own binaries)

Combined Community Codec Pack and K-Lite Codec Pack are two that I have used in the past, for what you need either should work. Both are geared towards video players, but include a lot of codecs.

Secondly, whenever messing with codecs on your system, restart after every change - if you install K-Lite, restart before doing anything else, and then verify what works and doesn't between each step. When you install WMP it also installs the official windows codecs for everything it plays, so remember that.

Firstly, do you use Nero? if so, I found this article on Microsoft's support pages.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935957

Secondly, not all codec packs are good for the OS, the 2 mentioned are what I too recommend, the latter K-Lite being able to detect and fix broken codecs.

Another source of information is:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme.../faq/codec.mspx

Codec checking utilities:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

http://www.updatexp.com/sherlock-codec-detective.html

Get CCCP and Classic Media Player very stable:
http://www.cccp-project.net/

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Medi...lassic.htm

I have no idea what the problem is, I've installed some of the codec packs and WMP now seems to be able to run fine from time to time. This piece of Microsoft engineering is evil I tell you.

Consider that a semi-fix, thanks everyone. If I have further problems with it I'll consult this thread again.

Forget codec hell, and use VLC - Free, Opensource, Fast, and loads of extra features without being typical Microsoft BloatWare. http://www.videolan.org

Highly recommended, with the broom of approval.

A & L Guy

Download K-lite Codec Mega pack. Media Player Classic as a default player. It's the best.

I made another admin user, seemed to have fixed the problem. The downside is that I've lost all my browser cookies, bookmarks, history tabs and god knows what else.

Q_Q

Hm, I have this problem as well. And like you, I would like to keep using WMP and not use VLC (which is NOT a good media player in my book, despite what everyone else is saying).

Like you, when I first open WMP it crashes. But if I close it via Task Manager -> processes -> kill wmplayer.exe and then re-launch it, it works. No problems at all. Which is.. weird.

' Wrote:Forget codec hell, and use VLC - Free, Opensource, Fast, and loads of extra features without being typical Microsoft BloatWare. http://www.videolan.org

Highly recommended, with the broom of approval.

A & L Guy

Unfortunately, I disagree with this. It's USEFUL, but that's about it.
We're talking about an application that tosses Codecs at a video to try to play it...