red and blue garbage on my MPG2 footage with Windows Media Player
 

It'd been a while since I'd generated some MPG2 footage but I did today and then played it in Windows Media Player. There were tonnes of random red and blue dots (about 2x2 pixels each) appearing all over it as it played! Previously I'd had no problems playing mpg2s and so I took the footage to another computer to test, and it played fine.

Even in Winamp the mpg2 came out grubby, although not as bad. (colours were off but I think that's another story)

I've installed a lot of software between the first time I encoded mpg2's and now so something along the lines has probably nuked my mpg2 decoder. I tried uninstalled Windows Media Player and reinstalling but no go.

Was just wondering if anyone else has had this problem and found a solution.....other than the dreaded reinstall...

Cheers
Aaron

Normally WMP does not have an MPEG2 decoder installed.
So this decoder comes from something else (this might be DVD
playback software, NLE applications, DVD authoring packages etc.).

The driver that is playing back either is not doing a good job or
is broken. I usually playback my mpeg2 with a software DVD
player (WinDVD) because I trust such software more than WMP
or any codec that I've got installed for MPEG2 decoding....

Thanks Rob. Yeah it's puzzling and I can't see any codecs in the actual "Add Remove programs area" which is annoying. I'll have to try and see if I can remove them manually, but they aren't easily distinguishable so who knows what codec I'll be removing..

They won't be in your uninstall area since they came with a
product. Where they are located is actually burried deep in
your system. If you do not know what you are doing I suggest
you either:

1. re-install the applications that might install such a codec
2. use another player (WinDVD etc.)
3. do a clean install of Windows and all your applications

Good luck!

Sometimes if you get codecs as separate installs you can uninstall them, but not in this case. I managed to root around and by trial and error weed out the culprit codec...Nuked it..then reinstalled another codec and all is well now....Now if I could just get Winamp to stop jittering when I play music it'd be great!

Cheers

On Win systems you might try looking for a little app called GSpot Codec Information Apliance.

It has a nice feature in that it will show you what Video or Audio codecs are installed on your system and where they live in the filesystem.

It will also attempt to identify which codecs would be involved in playback of a particular file. Sometimes that's useful.

Nice to have in your toolbox of goodies:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Thanks for the tool, looks very nice! ... Interesting name....

Now that's excellent! Thanks Rob.