no video with Windows Movie Maker

[AlanSilberlight]

Most recently, I do not get video with Windows Movie Maker with one of my computers (Dell laptop). Audio is fine. The files themselves are fine. They work with WMM on my desktop. The laptop had been working fine up to a few months ago. Any ideas or suggestions?
Thank you very much.

Alan Silberlight

[Stregga]

Alan,

You said that the laptop was working just fine until just a few months ago. What happened? A little more detail on what, if any, are some of the other problems you've been seeing might help narrow down the problem. If it's not playing video, what kind? AVI, MOV, WMV?

[Chuck Engels]

Can you play video in Windows Media Player still?
Something must have changed, added or removed software?

[AlanSilberlight]

Thank you for responding. The file is an mpeg file that I made myself using Premiere Elements. It does play with Windows Media Player. It also plays with Cyberlink PowerDVD. This has happened with several files. I'm sure that the files are fine. The problem is with Windows Movie Maker.
Thank you very much.
Alan Silberlight

[Chuck Engels]

What version of Movie Maker are you using?

[AlanSilberlight]

It says 5.1 and 2.1, but I believe it's the current version (and it used to work).

Thank you very much for responding.
Alan Silberlight

P.S. I just checked something. It plays video and audio for an avi file and a wmv file, but for an mpeg file it plays just the audio.

[Chuck Engels]

Is it the same as this?

About_MovieMaker.jpg

[AlanSilberlight]

It's the same version, I believe. One of the numbers is a bit different.

Thank you.

Alan

[Chuck Engels]

You could try a registry cleaner to see if some things have gotten messed up.
CCLeaner is one that I use.

The best option might be to uninstall Movie Maker and then go to Windows Update then download and install it again.
Either way I recommend using the registry cleaner during the process.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

To tidy up any registry settings run CCleaner as Chuck suggests but also run eusing free registry cleaner.

http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cle ... leaner.htm

Might seem a bit 'belt and braces' but it might also just solve the problem(?).

[Paul LS]

Sounds like Movie Maker does not have access to the MPEG decoder. You need to install one for Movie Maker to play mpegs. However you have one on your system if you have Cyberlink.

[Chuck Engels]

And it plays in Media Player too Paul, seems to weird to just be a codec thing.

[AlanSilberlight]

I went to Microsoft's website. There does not appear to be a separate download for WMM. It is part of XP SP2. Since I have the disk I tried re-installing it but I did not have success. I might have to use the other computer to make wmv files from mpegs. WMM is good because you can make wmv files of any size you want.

Thank you again.
Alan Silberlight

[Chuck Engels]

There has to be a way to fix it Alan, sure wish I knew what the problem was.

[Chuck Engels]

Alan, I found this site that has some very good info about troubleshooting WMM.
Maybe it will be of some help to you
http://www.papajohn.org/MM2-ProblemSolving.html

I did find someone that fixed the problem by updating their video driver, not sure that will help you.
I did also find some people that were having similar problems after upgrading to IE7, have you installed anything new lately or updated any software like internet explorer?

I just had another thought, download and install Windows Media Encoder. It is similar to Movie Maker in that it will convert files.
Installing Media Encoder might also fix the Movie Maker problem as well, give it a shot
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... fault.mspx