Getting mpeg video playback working on Windows 7
Jan 11, 2010 Misc
I recently took the plunge and bought a new PC after my ancient Athlon XP box became unstable. The new PC is using an Intel Core i5 CPU and ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU. I decided to use Windows 7 64-bit as the OS because I have 4G of RAM and Microsoft does not allow the 32-bit versions of their OS to use more than about 3G of RAM.
While things have gone pretty well I have had 2 major issues that have bugged me (no pun intended).
- No stable flash player for 64-bit browsers.
- Most mpeg videos would not show any picture when playing.
The flash problem has not been a big issue since it has prevented most of the annoying web ads from displaying and I always have the option of using the 32-bit version of IE when I need flash (eg, Youtube).
The mpeg issue on the other hand was quite frustrating because I couldn’t find a workaround for it for some time. As it turns out just because my new Windows 7 OS ships with DirectX 11 that doesn’t mean that older DirectX functions will work correctly, such as GPU accelerated mpeg decoding. Thanks to a helpful thread on the Boxee forum I found a DirectX update tool on the Microsoft website. Running this tool downloaded and installed some DirectX components and now video playback is working perfectly.
You’d think Microsoft would test that sort of thing before releasing the OS so it works without updates but I guess that is too much to ask for.
For those who are interested there is a 64 bit beta version of the flash player available here.
Tags: windows 7
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