When this stuff happens, are you able to play uncompressed WAV files? Any
audio (not video) files?

Does Sound Recorder work (it's using low-level Win32 multimedia API, as
opposed to WMP that uses DirectSound)? Try uncompressed, as well as ADPCM
compressed files in it.

I would guess it's WMP11 screwup, not cured by uninstall. If you switch to
different user, does Windows occasionally refuse you do so?

Does playback recover when you do logoff/logon (without restart)?

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
I've been experiencing some audio problems recently on one my systems. The
problem only occurs on Windows video files (AVI, WMV, MPG, etc.), but not
on Quicktime video files (MOV). I've tried several different media
players, from the default Windows Media Player, to Media Player Classic,
RealPlayer, Nero Showtime, and various other media players lying around
that were packaged with various things.

The symptoms are always the same. The video plays, but the audio doesn't
after the first time. So for example, you can play any video file with its
video & audio the first time after reboot, but when you try playing it a
second time (or playing any other video file for that matter), the audio
doesn't play anymore. Windows Media Player starts and exits saying,
"You're running low on memory, quit other programs and try again",
followed by the "Close" button. Yeah, right I have 1GB of RAM, and 3.5GB
of swap! Media Player Classic just aborts completely. RealPlayer plays the
video, but there's no sound. Other media players do the same sort of thing
too.

Now, I think it's an audio codec problem because Quicktime player plays
its own files without problems, since it has its own native codecs
built-in. Also audio files aren't affected if you play them through
Winamp, which also has its own internal MP3 codec. But try to play the
same MP3's through Windows Media Player, and no sound comes out, because
it's using the default system codec.

I'm not sure if this is related but the problems seem to have started
after a recent Microsoft major patch update. I was thinking maybe the
update to WMP 11 was causing it, so I uninstalled it and reverted back to
WMP 10, but that didn't cure it. I've also updated the soundcard drivers
(Hercules GameSurround Fortissimo III 7.1) to the latest available, but
that didn't do anything. Windows XP SP2, of course.

How would I go about debugging the codec? Changing default codecs, etc.?

Yousuf Khan