Totally O/T I need tech help getting my vid clip to work!

ladyofivy
ladyofivy Posts: 648
edited September 21 in Chit-Chat
I videoed my son getting on the bus for school yesterday using my canon camera. I've never had a problem taking and loading videos with it before, but with this clip I get this message:

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.

I have a feeling that it has to do with the way I unloaded the camera. I unloaded it once, and then went to erase my card contents, but ended up just reloading them again on accident, and then deleted the card. When I did this, it appeared that the video didn't unload at all. I actually just stumbled on the video accidentally just now when I went to resize my photos and opened up that file using a program called XNView.

It's a really important video, or else I wouldn't bother. :frown:

Is there any magician here who could help me?

Replies

  • fun_mom
    fun_mom Posts: 54 Member
    I would first try to play it in something other than Windows Media Player such as QuickTime which you can download from Apple. I did a quick google search on your error (always the first step when trying to troubleshoot an error message) and came across this forum which has a lot of good advice you can try. Good luck

    http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistapictures/thread/0ffbfe43-5a2e-4e35-ae1a-b2dffdd9544d
  • Aid_B
    Aid_B Posts: 427
    pm sent
  • SHBoss1673
    SHBoss1673 Posts: 7,161 Member
    you can PM me if you like. After 15 years in the computer industry on the tech side, if it's fixable, I can do it. What is the extension that it's listed with.

    Microsoft (and any video player) uses something called a codec to read video files, this is basically just a bunch of files that tells the media player how to recombine the data so that it is playable (that's the layman's definition). If you saved the file in a video type that microsoft media player doesn't have a codec for then it can't read the file. This is relatively easy to fix. There are lots of free "ripper" programs on download.com that will convert avi to mpeg or divx or quicktime or what ever you want them to be in, you just need to know what the extension of the file is (I.E. the three or four letters after the period in the file name), if you don't see an extension, it just means you need to turn on that feature in windows (if it's a windows machine).
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