Gaming World Forums
General Category => Technology and Programming => Topic started by: afters on October 30, 2008, 03:00:17 am
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I'm using Winamp verson 5.541, which is the newest version. I often connect my laptop to my TV and play TV shows and movies from my computer onto the TV using Winamp, but a couple days ago it stopped working. Winamp will play the video on my computer, but on the TV it comes up with a maroon-ish screen. The sound still works fine. On another media player, VLC, the video shows up fine. The reason I don't just switch to VLC (which I only got for playing .mkv files) is that most of my .avi videos constantly freeze and lag with it. Does anyone know either A. how to get Winamp to show the video on my TV again, or B. how to make VLC stop constantly freezing and creating block patterns?
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Did you update graphics drivers or something recently? What did you do before it stopped?
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I would assume it's a problem with the codecs, and VLC is a codec-less player I believe? You should toy with the settings or try a newer version of VLC, its easily one of the most stable and compatible players for me.
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The only times i've had problems with VLC are when the video is encoded crappily (with crappy settings an dso the picture is very bad) or the AVI is broken, which makes it so you cannot fast-foward/rewind, but other than that it's easily the fastest, slimmest and best media player around.
goat is VLC codec-less or does it just have its' own library of codecs that it uses instead of any found on your system?
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it has its own library of codecs that it uses.
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Also check out media player classic (http://www.download.com/Windows-Media-Player-Classic-/3000-2200_4-10023410.html).
Edit: For VLC player, in preferences/video/output modules, (make sure advanced options at the bottom right is set) you'll have quite a few choices. Try directx, opengl and maybe even windows gdi to see which gives you best performance.
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@Jeff - I can't recall doing anything before it started. I installed a game not all that long before, but it was a game I'd already had and uninstalled. It didn't affect anything before. In addition, I watched things on Winamp through my TV after installing the game without any problem.
As far as the Winamp thing goes, I installed ffdshow, after the problem began, and it did nothing to help. VLC still does the blocky thing with certain shows. Futurama, for example, freezes constantly. When I watch Ranma, however, it is fine. They're all avi files.
@goat: I have the newest version, and I tried changing the settings and things stayed exactly the same.
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VLC still does the blocky thing with certain shows. Futurama, for example, freezes constantly. When I watch Ranma, however, it is fine. They're all avi files.
The important thing isn't so much the container as it is the actual codec used to encode the video. There's a variety of ways to go about encoding video, notable ones being Xvid, DivX, h.264/x264, and wmv. Chances are, the Futurama files you tried to play were encoded in a different manner than the Ranma files. Try finding out what codecs those .avi files are encoded with. Your system specs would prove handy too.
As for the original problem with Winamp, did you try disabling the overlay (if it was enabled)?
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Use a program like g-spot (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/) to find the specific codec a video file uses.
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Download Combined Community Codecs (http://www.cccp-project.net/). It comes with Zoom Player and Media Player Classic. Basically the codecs lets you play any media file with any media player. I can play .mkv .ogg .avi .mp4, etc. on DivX, Zoom, MPC, VLC, etc.