Liz said:
My friend is using a touch screen computer and the OS is Wndows 7.
I use XP Home and I sent her a video today of WMV and she says her computer
says ‘Windows Media Player cannot play the file
Can anyone assist as to how she can view these files?
thank you in advance,
Liz.
The whole error message might have been like this:
"Windows Media Player cannot play the file.
The Player might not support the file type or
might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."
And that would mean, that a CODEC on the receiving computer
is not available to decode the content.
There are solutions to this, but they're far from automatic.
You'd think an idiotic operating system, would have an
option to "save in a default compatible format", any movie
you could see, so that you could send it to any other person
using the same OS.
But that is too much to expect. Instead, we wallow in a
sea of incompatibility. If you wanna watch movies, you'd
better be "an expert".
*******
Where I'd start, is with this program. It gives information on the
CODEC used by the movie. By using this program on your (working) computer,
you should be able to identify the CODEC being used. It's an awfully
busy screen.
http://gspot.headbands.com/v26x/GSpot270a.zip
Now, for example, if I drag and drop a DVD movie file onto
the open tool window, it might look like this.
http://img.brothersoft.com/screenshots/softimage/g/gspot-190045-1.jpeg
You could always take a snapshot of what shows up in the window
of that program, and post the picture on imageshack.us , and then
send the URL of the resulting Imageshack web page in another
posting.
The problem is, you have to interpret what is being said in that
window. You'd have to know (somehow), that Windows doesn't typically
include a DVD player by default, and if an MPEG2 CODEC was
provided with the computer, someone would have had to pay a licensing
fee. Most companies don't want to pay that fee.
So anyway, I'd start with that tool, because even if the file extension
on the movie is wrong (it's not really a .wmv movie), that program will
give some hints as to what it is.
*******
Once you have some foggy notion as to the movie type, you have two options.
Do a conversion on your end, to a format your friend's computer can read.
Or, tell your friend what CODEC file needs to be downloaded. Neither
approach is really guaranteed to work out well. One conversion tool
I have here, doesn't tell you what a "default guaranteed compatible"
format is. I've got in trouble before, by selecting the wrong output
format, and *none* of my other tools could read it.
If you get the recipient to download a CODEC, there is no guarantee
that will work out well either. CODEC packs sometimes trash the video
playback setup on the computer, so downloading wads of them isn't
always the best choice. And some CODEC packs, have the odd bad CODEC
in them, which gives poor playback qualities.
A second best choice, is to ask the recipient to download a new
media player. For example, Media Player Classic. I haven't used
this one myself (I don't play a lot of movies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_player_classic
The ones that use DirectShow here, should be able to tap into the
CODECs already in Windows. Ones based on ffmpeg, would be more oriented
towards things like DVD movies perhaps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_media_players
I don't think any of these ideas is really foolproof, and if I had
to help one of my own family members remotely, to enable them to
play an arbitrary movie, I doubt I'd be successful at it. Too many
things could go wrong, and they'd probably be in too much of
a hurry, to get it working.
Paul
