Media player problems

[king905au]

I am having problems with my windows media player it is only 6.4v but i tryed to download the 7v and it made no difference, what is happing is the video will only run for a few sec and then stop but the indicater bar still moves i have also reinstalled windows 98se with no luck......

if anyone can help I would be very thankfull

[mjc]

Does this occur with video you are downloading, loacally generated (A tutorial on your system) or both?

What kind of connection do you have to the internet?

Also a few more specifics about you system, CPU, memory, etc wouold be helpful.

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mjc

[king905au]

both when download and playing from file i dont think that the type of system should matter as one day it was working fine the next day it started to play up and have made no changes but anyway its a 233mhz procceser with only 32mb ram and 20g hard drive not to sure what my mother board is and i have a 56k connection.if you need to know more please let me know thanks.

[king905au]

it seams that i can play back clips that are in asf form but not mpeg or avi dont know if this means anything but thought it might help

[mjc]

Well, if it were just download or streaming media then it could be a connection problem since media files are one of the most demanding types of downloads.

Hve you recently updated anything (Windows Update stuff? Media Player update didn't help?)

Check the settings on media player tools -> options -> performance play around with buffering, ahardware acceleration because each of these setting can have a tremenous impact on quality and can help taylor WMP to you system. 32MB of memory is a little low to efficiently play back a large media file most of the file will either be cached or will have to be broken into chunks that youur memory can handle. Check and see what you have running in the background (crtl-alt-del once only otherwise you'll reboot) see what's running then you can turn off some of what's running in the background by typing msconfig in the run box and going to the startup tab (system tray and explorer must be left on). One of the areas to look at disabling are any kind of programs that try to update you computer while connected to the internet(most have something like background updater in their name or description)

Post back with programs that you can't figure out what they do and maybe we could help figure them out.

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mjc

[king905au]

i closed all progams in the back ground and still no go the clip seems to keep on playing the scree just frezzs if you click on the bar it will run from that point fine as but only for a short time just the same as when you start it they are big files but the where running fine before,i havent changed any of the settings and when i reinstalled it it set all the settings back as they where anyway i dont know what to do i am STUCK!!!!!

[mjc]

Goto the performance tab under options and try setting your own buffer size instead of the default. Increasing the size of the buffer has helped me sometimes, but it takes longer to start playing with a larger buffer.

Also since you have tried WMP7 have you looked for updated drivers for your video card and sound card?

System specs do have alot to do with it. The buffers used are part of your RAM. So if you are running a larger program(WMP7) then there is less for the video. I would consider adding at least another 32MB if not more memory (memory prices are fairly low right now so you sholud be able to find pretty good prices).

How often do run defrag?

You should run it about once week if you don't have it scheduled to run automatically. If your harddrive is very fragmented then Windows will spend more time searching for data and that will slow things down especially when working with large files like media files.

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mjc

[bassvax]

Your mention of how the media player has no probs with the asx files may mean that you will have to have those other files 'associated' with the media player. Now I just got tired of the Windows Media Player (had 7) and uninstalled and as much as I hate the things that come with Real Player I downloaded it. Saying this because I can't remember what the tab sequence is to get to the file asscociation for the media player. Look in the tools, options and preferences sections in the player. I never got good streaming quality (even on this PIII 800 with 128MB RAM and Ultra ATA- 100 with 56k modem)with Win MP, but RealPlayer does just fine.

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Jerry