Question

AVIs in Windows Movie Maker have audio, but black video.

Asked by: pigletiger

When AVis are inserted into Windows Movie Maker on XP, the audio works fine, but the video is completely black (see attached screenshot).

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Asked On
2009-07-03 at 01:39:51ID24541836
Tags

Windows Movie Maker

,

windows movie maker

,

movie maker

,

Windows

,

Windows XP

,

XP

Topic

Windows XP Operating System

Participating Experts
4
Points
125
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: IainNIXPosted on 2009-07-03 at 02:25:22ID: 24771108

do the AVI's playback ok through Media Player??  Do you have WMP 11.0 or DivX 7 installed?

does Movie Maker allow you to add WMV's instead, AVI's are large and uncompressed - you can convert them wth this nice program, just remember to choose the right settings to match your AVI, keep the resolution as close to the original as possible, by default the application sometimes has a lower/smaller setting.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_any_video_converter/

Filehippo is a great site for free apps and drivers/plug-ins.  Update agent is handy too.

 

by: ZeftronPosted on 2009-07-03 at 03:56:34ID: 24771489

Sounds like a codec issue to me - if you do a google search for a codec pack, download the k-like codec pack, updated last week and see if installing that gets round the problem.

Zef.

 

by: IainNIXPosted on 2009-07-03 at 04:40:31ID: 24771717

That's why i am asking if he can play back the files normally in Media Player -- it would help isolate a possible codec issue, but AVI's rarely fail to play due to the in-built codec already in WMP, just depends on the app used to make the AVI.

 

by: QEMS2Posted on 2009-07-03 at 05:22:53ID: 24771888

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
Download the klite codec pack from here that will solve the issue and will let you watch them in media player also.
The other way to sort it is to use some conversion software and convert your avi to wmv file first, this will work then but a pain as you will have to convert the file irst before you edit the movie.

 

by: pigletigerPosted on 2009-07-03 at 07:52:17ID: 24772719

I think you're right about the codecs. I don't have permissions to change them though. AVIs play fine in Media Player.

 

by: MASQUERAIDPosted on 2009-07-04 at 04:33:56ID: 24776649

The file extension .AVI describes a group of video file types, there isn't a single codec that plays all AVIs.
Movie Maker should be able to access all the video codecs on your machine to use for playback so, yes, this is about codec problem with the AVI file you are trying to play.  However in this case the problem is almost certainly down to Movie Maker's abilty to work with the AVI video codec in question.  So the answer is NOT to install a codec because WMP can already play the file.

There are two fixes I'd suggest:

Quickest fix would be to see if there is a more recent version of Movie Maker available for download and install that as a lot of AVI import handling features have been improved in the more recent versions.

The other alternative would be to re-encode the AVI to a more "Movie Maker friendly" format such as WMV or MPEG this will take a while (depending on file size) to re-index all the frames and audio track(s) so try the version update first.

Both options should work unless this really is an obscure version of one of the 800 or so AVI formats.

 

by: pigletigerPosted on 2009-07-05 at 03:45:15ID: 31599495

Converting the .AVIs worked.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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