XviDs crash Vista Media Center, DVD Maker and Movie Maker - would FFDHOW help?

I've known for a while that Vista Media Center crashes instantly when I try and play XviD (and I'm assuming DivX) files but today I found that so does DVD Maker and Movie Maker. Everything plays fine in WMP11 and I have the newest DivX installed.

I tried decompressing the audio in a file that causes a crash with a nice little program called decompress.exe that creates a new .AVI file with uncompressed PCM audio to see if it was a problem with the audio not being compatible but it didn't help so I used VirtualDub to save it as a HUGE uncompresses .AVI and DVDMaker doesn't crash when I import that.
.WMV files work fine of course.

Questions?
Why are DivX files so much trouble still after all these months that Vista has be released?

Should I try FFDSHOW? I don't like messing with that kind of stuff when everything is working but I guess you could say that everything ISN'T working so maybe it would be worth a try.

I checked out which codecs where being used when I decode one of these files with Gspot and I saw that the AC3 filter was always being used even when I wasn't playing a files with .AC3 audio so I went into the .AC3 filter config and uncheked everything but .ac3 and it didn't help. I'm guessing it has nothing to do with audio anyway.

Use CCCP, this is the only codec pack I have installed on my Vista MC machine and it plays everything I throw at it without problem.

The latest DivX codecs work great for me.  I've had a lot of trouble with some Open-Source codecs like ffdshow and XViD.  I'd uninstall those and go with just DivX.  They're all nominally supposed to be compatible, so DivX should play XViD-encoded files and vice-versa.

dentaku wrote:


I'm wondering if it has something to do with Nero 7?
Using Gspot207 I see this
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/3077/neaudioae4.jpg

That's showing you that it has found 3 ways to render the audio stream.  The first two are OK (ACM and Nero), but the DMO route is what fails.

GraphEdit is also a handy tool for seeing what rendering paths actually work.

nksingh wrote:

The latest DivX codecs work great for me.  I've had a lot of trouble with some Open-Source codecs like ffdshow and XViD.  I'd uninstall those and go with just DivX.  They're all nominally supposed to be compatible, so DivX should play XViD-encoded files and vice-versa.

I've only installed DivX and haven't bothered with any unofficial codec packs or open source stuff. It's not like I don't trust FFDSHOW but I'm not going to mess with it unless I have a good reason to.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with Nero 7?
Using Gspot207 I see this
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/3077/neaudioae4.jpg

It's quite annoying because DVD Maker is nice and I'd like to use it and if it didn't crash I might use Media Center.

The first time I noticed a problem was when I added a folder to Media Center to watch and it just crashes back to the desktop even before it can display the thumbnails of all the video files in the folder.

It gives me this error.

Problem caused by DivX™ Codec

This problem was caused by DivX™ Codec. DivX™ Codec was created by DivX, Inc..
DivX, Inc. is aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available.

Recommendation

---

To learn more about this problem, DivX, Inc. recommends that you go online to the following website.
DivX, Inc.

I'm thinking it doesn't have anything to do with audio and it's more likely a video problem.
DVD Maker, Movie Maker and Media Center work with .WMV files and uncompressed .AVI files just fine and I even tried an Xvid with plain old PCM audio (instead of the regular mp3 or ac3) and it still crashes. Movie Maker will even accept .VOB files (which surprised me) but of course it's just an MPEG2 file with a different file extension.

I'm going to un-install DivX and see what happens because divxdec.ax is always the culprit when Media Center crashes so I'm assuming it's also the same with DVD Maker and Movie Maker.

dentaku wrote:

I'm going to un-install DivX and see what happens because divxdec.ax is always the culprit when Media Center crashes so I'm assuming it's also the same with DVD Maker and Movie Maker.

I just un-installed everything that has to do with DivX and somehow I can still play DivX and XviD content in WMP11 and Media Center doesn't crash now, Gspot has no clue how to render it anymore so it's not able to tell me how WMP11 and Media Center are actually playing these files, DVD Maker still crashes instantly and Movie Maker will play them but will crash if you try and do anything more.

I've looked around for a more appropriate forum than C9 but The Green Button seems pretty dead and the Movie Maker forums seem to be more concerned with XP and has some pretty old information on it but at least it would be worth a try I guess.

It's great that Media Center works but it's DVD Maker that's annoying me and is what started all this.

dentaku wrote:


I'm going to un-install DivX and see what happens because divxdec.ax is always the culprit when Media Center crashes so I'm assuming it's also the same with DVD Maker and Movie Maker.

If you want to try taking out indvidual filters try Insurgent it'll let you register and de-register indvidual filters.

PerfectPhase wrote:



dentaku wrote:  I'm going to un-install DivX and see what happens because divxdec.ax is always the culprit when Media Center crashes so I'm assuming it's also the same with DVD Maker and Movie Maker.

If you want to try taking out indvidual filters try Insurgent it'll let you register and de-register indvidual filters.

I recently tired Insurgent but didn't look at it too much. Now I see that you can register and unregister filters with it if you turn on the advanced features.
I think GSpot lets you change the merit of certain filters too so that could also come in handy.

PerfectPhase wrote:



Use CCCP, this is the only codec pack I have installed on my Vista MC machine and it plays everything I throw at it without problem.

I decided to not go quite that far but here's what I did.

I uninstalled DivX yesterday and Media Center stopped crashing but it didn't help DVD Maker or Movie Maker.
This morning I un-installed AC3 filter and I'd get a "COM surrogate has stopped working" error when opening a folder that had video files in it and was set to view thumbnails. I tried renaming the NeVideo.ax file like someone suggested on another website and it didn't help so I put it back and restarted.

NOW: with DivX un-installed and AC3 filter un-installed I decided to just go for it and install ffdshow_rev1508_20071005_clsid.

DVD Maker finally doesn't crash, Movie Maker is still confused and will crash if I do anything more than just adding a file to the timeline and Media Center seems to work fine.

Wouldn't it be great if Sony would decide they didn't want Vegas and DVD Architect anymore so Microsoft would take it over and release Vegas Movie Studio as Live Movie Studio for free like they did with Live Picture Gallery? It would have support for Silverlight and integrate with Soapbox.

Is that program for 32bit vista or 64bit or both ?

What do you recommend the steps to follow for those who already  have other codecs installed such as that from xvid.org ?

Should it be uninstalled ? After using what you have recommended will the windows media player and movie maker still crash?

Sorry to bother with you those too many questions.

It took me nealry a week to findout some solutions and shared that on my blog, if anyone finds its them interesting its at http://bhupen.k6yar.com/
 My problem is VISTA's movie maker crashes with the xvid codec. While it still crashes, I am still able to make the movie by not doing too much on the it such as sliding the movie maker timeline rather just point to it and also by not previewing it using the main previou button instead using the one above the time line.

Thanks for that codec, gonna check-it out and hope to hear from some of you.

Ruben
--"When you boot your PC, say little prayer... "Lord, give this PC to give me Peace!" LOL !

lolnepal wrote:

 My problem is VISTA's movie maker crashes with the xvid codec. While it still crashes, I am still able to make the movie by not doing too much on the it such as sliding the movie maker timeline rather just point to it and also by not previewing it using the main previou button instead using the one above the time line.

Mine also freezes with XVid, DivX and AVI. Doesn't bother me, however, I never use WMM.

I too had a problem with Windows DVD  maker, I tried everything! I added/removed/swapped the video's on my DVD, I was using READYboost, turned that off, took out the SD card, I searched Microsft Websites until I was kicked out (They say there was an internal error, but I am pretty sure they got sick of my questions...), finally I found this post.
Removed DIVX, tried again, the DVD maker would crash at 5.1% on the render... EVERY SINGLE TIME!
OK... reset my laptop (Dell Inspiron, Vista Home Premium)
Crashed at 5.1%
Went into my Win32, deleted: VSFilter.dll, moved all the DivX dll's.
Restarted my computer...
It's Burning the disc now!!!!!
(Of course that means I am past the rendering...)

I am so happy!