Black And White Video In Windows Media Player

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Rhythmwiz - 03 Apr 2006 12:08 GMT

Hi all

I really hope someone can help me out: very suddenly Windows Media Player
has started to play .avi files (DivX and XviD) only in black and white (or in
one case a strange two-tone green and purple) and not full colour. The same
files, however, display correctly in Nero Showtime and DivX Player. I used
GSpot to see which codecs were being used to decode the files, and tried
re-installing the appropriate decoder (FFD Show) but it made no difference.

No changes have been made to my PC - it was playing the files correctly
yesterday and today it won't. Has anyone any ideas about this? Thanks in
advance for any help.

(BTW - I am using WMP 10 on Windows XP Pro).

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Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] - 03 Apr 2006 21:10 GMT

> Hi all
>
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
>yesterday and today it won't. Has anyone any ideas about this? Thanks in
>advance for any help.

Apparently it's the result of a recent update. It goes away (from what
I've heard) if you update to the most recent DivX play bundle.

HTH
Cheers - Neil

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Rhythmwiz - 04 Apr 2006 11:42 GMT

> Apparently it's the result of a recent update. It goes away (from what
> I've heard) if you update to the most recent DivX play bundle.
>
> HTH
> Cheers - Neil

I'll give that a go and see if it helps. Thanks.

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St. John - 05 Jun 2006 08:32 GMT

I'm using Windows Media Center. This problem occured after the update
mentioned above. Since then I've updated Media Player to V.11 and
re-installed DIVX to the latest version. Still no good. Videos played in
WMP are still B&W.

Please help,

John

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Rhythmwiz - 05 Jun 2006 15:22 GMT

> I'm using Windows Media Center. This problem occured after the update
> mentioned above. Since then I've updated Media Player to V.11 and
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> John

In WMP, unders Tools>Options>Performance>Advanced, look in Video
Acceleration to see if "Use high quality mode" is selected - that's what
turned out to be the problem with me. Selecting "Use high quality mode"
caused the video to play in black and white.

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St. John - 05 Jun 2006 16:30 GMT

> > I'm using Windows Media Center. This problem occured after the update
> > mentioned above. Since then I've updated Media Player to V.11 and
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> turned out to be the problem with me. Selecting "Use high quality mode"
> caused the video to play in black and white.

Well, that did the trick. Although, when I checked my options, "Use high
quality mode" was already selected. By unchecking this, all of my videos
seem to be back in full color. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Cheers,

John

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