Windows Movie Maker Vids - Audio but Black Screen

Hey, I'm really confused and have googled for hours on a solution but
I'm so tired I decided to just make a post on it hoping somebody would
help me.

I was asking one of my friends and they recommended this place for me,
so here I am.

The problem seems to be with my .avi videos when I put them on Windows
Movie Maker. They're videos i spend days downloading for an AMV that I
downloaded from Vuze recently, and they seem to work fine with anything
apart from WMM and Windows DVD Maker (But windows DVD maker is a diff
issue anyway that I wont address here).

I've tried all sorts of things. I unticked "AVI DVD Compressor" because
when I left it ticked, whenever I tried moving .AVI vids to the timeline
it would just say "Windows Movie Maker Has Stopped Working" and close
the whole thing. But unticking it got me atleast somewhere, but now I
face yet another problem.

When I try to play my videos (timelines or not), the audio only comes
and the video is replaced with a transfixed black screen. I've tried all
sorts of codecs and what not, and I'm totally lost now. I dont know
what's wrong, but was wondering if anyone could help me.

Im not too good with Compressors, Decompressors and Codecs and what
have you, but given the instructions I'm good at following them, and
hope to be able to make videos properly soon with my .avi videos.

Oh, and I dont want to convert them because that just makes the quality
worse, as .AVI videos give the best playback quality for me.

It sounds to me like you have symptoms of too many codecs installed.
People tend to throw codec packs into PC's and hope that one of them
will work....instead the codecs cause conflicts.

.AVI is a container wrapper...it's an extension that can be given to
any video compressed with any of the codecs in use today....so AVI can
be any of the 800+ flavours.

The trick is to find out which codec was used for the video you
downloaded off the net... I'm not going to try and guess which it is but
there are programs available to work it out.

Once you have worked it out, install only the codec needed and
everything should work.
___________________________
Windows Vista Home Premium x64 + SP1
ASUS P5K MB
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz
4GB RAM (DDR2)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
Realtek HD onboard sound

Hm, are you sure? Because why will they play on windows media play but
not WMM; isn't the same codecs used with both? Apart from AVI
Decompressor which I unfiltered as stated before.

My vid was downloaded from Azureus Vuze, a torrent downloaded, but im
finding it hard to find which codec is right and I'm getting confused

Anybody got any suggestions or help? :eek:

its most likely mpeg4 or divx or ac3 i know those all work together well
i use those codec packs myself

heres the links for dl.

Mpeg-4 ~ 'http://www.koepi.info/Xvid-1.2.1-04122008.exe'
(http://www.xvid.org/News.64.0.html?&...a7d2&tx_ttnews)

Divx ~ http://www.divx.com/downloads/divx
ac3 ~ 'SourceForge.net: AC3Filter: Downloading ...'
(http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ac3...lter_1_51a.exe)

This is not a codec issue, it's a WMM issue. I have the same issue when
I use WMM to import video directly from my HDV camcorder. WMM can't
even decode the HD video that it encoded itself. There was a hotfix
(sorry I don't recall the url) but it didn't work anyway. The clip
images show up fine but when you play them in preview you get the black
screen. When you play them with Media Player it's a green screen w/
audio. If you play the same clip 10 times it'll be black nine times and
work perfectly once. I've been working on this problem for about six
months now and I hate to say it but the only solution seems to be to
keep our fingers crossed that they fix it in Windows 7

[Pingo]

i am having the same problem, BUT i did not download any codecs. heck, i don't even know what those are. anyhoo, none of my videos from my Flip Camcorder will show up on ANY movie maker. it's just a blank screen with just audio. help ppl!!!!!

One is a player and the other is an editor...different beasts.

Even on my pro-sumer editor I occasionally come across similar
situations...plays in WINDVD or WMC but put it in an editor and it won't
play.

Just to be on the safe side though make sure you have the latest MS
DirectX (march 2009) installed....this might help

I think the easiest would be to convert the video format to .wmv using
the free Format Factory ( 'Format Factory - Free media file format
converter' Since .wmv is the "native"
Vista format, you avoid all problems.

[Pingo]

yeah but i tried using format factory and changing it to .wmv--does not work. well it worked for the first one but all the other ones? nope.

[Sai-Jackal]

I hope I'm not kicking around a dead topic here. But I am basically having the exact same problem.

I had no codecs installed as my computer was brand new. The file imported without any problems, but try and play a clip and you get the audio but no picture. I did eventually download a "K-lite" codec pack which allowed me to play .avi on windows media player. But it didn't effect Windows movie maker at all.

Is there another video editing program that anyone can recommend that will perhaps not have this problem?

Sai-Jackal;1145978 Wrote:
> I hope I'm not kicking around a dead topic here. But I am basically
> having the exact same problem.
>
> I had no codecs installed as my computer was brand new. The file
> imported without any problems, but try and play a clip and you get the
> audio but no picture. I did eventually download a "K-lite" codec pack
> which allowed me to play .avi on windows media player. But it didn't
> effect Windows movie maker at all.
>
> Is there another video editing program that anyone can recommend that
> will perhaps not have this problem?
>
>
>


Windows Movie Maker works best with the .wmv filetype. The easiest is
to use Format Factory ( 'Format Factory - Free media file format
converter' (http://www.formatoz.com/) ) and convert your clips. Format
Factory does a high quality job and it is free and easy to use.
You should be aware that you have a considerable loss of quality when
you edit with WMM. That is why I use Machete ( 'Lossless Video and Audio
Editor (splitter,joiner) for AVI,FLV,WMV,WMA,ASF,MP3 files'
(http://www.machetesoft.com/) ) which sell for $19.95 (lifetime
license). There the output is exactly like the input. You can try it for
free for 2 weeks and see whether you like it.


--
whs