"muzician21" wrote in message


I'm including RAP since I imagine you've run into audio
issues with Windows. I'm having an oddball problem I've
never encountered before. Running XP Pro SP3, I find that
when I play video with Windows Media Player there's
static & popping in the audio. The same video plays fine
in Virtualdub and with SoundForge.

I tried uninstalling WMP and reinstalling, seemed to work
at first but then developed the same issue.

It used to work fine on this Windows install, the issue
seems to have cropped up recently. What's the difference
between how VirtualDub and SoundForge accesses/plays
video audio and how WMP plays it?

Of all the responses you've received so far, the one from Soundhaspriority
is IMO right on. As he says in slightly different words:

Part of the design of Windows includes the OS maintenance of a shared
library of codecs (coder/decoders) for audio and video files. Thus, player
software itself may be relieved of the chore of providing the dozens of
codecs that can be required by the various media files that it processes.
The player software itself can maintain a private inventory of codecs that
it uses in preference to all or part of the shared system library of codecs.
On many occasions there is an overlap between the shared system library of
codecs and the various private libraries of codecs, whose resolution is up
to the system and the player software. This is semi-organized chaos!

It is quite possible that Virtualdub and Soundforge are decoding your video
files using their own private codec libraries, while it is expected that
Windows Media Player would use the main shared system codec libraries. The
shared system codec libraries are unfortunately exposed to being updated
from many sources, including the installation of an OS service pack. I would
expect the OS Service pack to send things backwards, technologically.

It is possible that one or more audio or video decoders that were
beneficially installed by various player and/or editing software that you
installed in the past, were overlaid by the latest OS Service Pack.

Installing a video card also has the potential to update audio and video
codecs. Some codecs have very similar overall functioning but may or may
not exploit hardware performance features such as higher-level CPU
instruction sets like MMX and SSE, or include codecs that exploit
specialized hardware that is part of a video card.

The whole business of decoding audio and video can be a bit of a nightmare
because the problem has signficantly grown since the original codec
infrastructure was designed.

One approach would be to try reinstalling any other audio playing or editing
software including Virtualdub and SoundForge. They were probably installed
after the previous OS service pack was installed and may have beneficially
overlaid some of the codecs that came with your PC. Re-installing your video
card may or may not help. DVD playing software such as EasyDVD includes is
own suite of codecs and reinstalling it may have a beneficial effect.

A quick shotgun approach might be to install a large scale collection of
encoders and decoders such as the "K-Lite Mega Codec Pack" which is a free
download and IME remarkably effective as a codec problem solver despite the
fact that it is more like using a shotgun to solve the problem, than to use
a rifle which would be my preference.