I'm having a problem playing full-length mpeg2 videos (off hard-drive) using software players, whereas short-length mpg's will play! I have tried a variety of players including WMP 9,10 & 11, AlShow, Ace MP, WinDVD8 and WMC. These players all play perfectly short length videos such as movie trailers (mpg), but anything of appreciable length (1 1/2 - 2 hrs) will NOT play, I just get digital garbage on screen (vertical bars to snow to random colour pixels, lossly associated with the pictures).
I have tried all the popular codecs including K-Lite, NVidea, Essential, Canopus.
The weird thing though, is that there is ONE player that WILL play all the full length videos and that is VLC - it's perfect.
However, I don't wish to use VLC, I prefer Alshow for reasons to do with playlisting.
This seems to rule out the video card and 'overlay' problems etc. So if it's not hardware - then what is disrupting video playback. It's esp. weird that WMP will not behave.
Video card is Ge-Force 7300. I can supply more info if anyone wishes to venture an idea. Thanks.
Wild guess! Do you have virtual memory set to 'System managed size', if not change it to that.
How much memory do you have?
Thanks Aegis. I have 2gb ddr2/800 installed. I can't check those settings until Tuesday.
If it has 2gb of RAM, I don't think that the virtual memory setting is the problem.
The only thing I can think of is that the full-length videos may be especially encoded against unlawful use and that VLC is able to get around the issue. This is a legitimate commercial application (rights are paid) where the content is supplied on hdd so I will check with the vendor to see which codec they're using. Will post answer.
Details from the vendor of my full-length mpeg2 files reveal nothing unusual about their encoding, apparently mastered out of Adobe Premiere. I have since installed some more video players but the result is the same - they won't play my full length videos. VLC continues to be the only player that will. What is going on here???
SOLVED: Transpires that the files were being encoded in 4.2.2 colour-space (colour compression). I did not have the matching codec. The files that were playing were encoded 4.2.0 and I had that codec. However, the correct codec had to be sourced from a very early version (not the latest of the net) and I was just lucky enough to be able to source this (like about 3 years back version!). A bitter lesson learnt, and a lot of time wasted on this.
