Thanks for all the help. I finally figured it out, it had nothing to do with the codec or the format of the video, it was the video driver. Like I said before I had gone to the laptop manufacture's web site and downloaded the video driver. Just for the heck of it today I went to Intel and installed their driver. I had avoided this in the first place because the graphics card is integrated with the motherboard and laptop makers often make a custom version bundling the mobo with the video driver. Well it turns out that all the other video applications worked fine using the laptop's driver, except for Premiere.