Wtf? I’ve been advised to download this mysterious ‘application’ before, all it seems to do is give me a load of cryptic config pages and do nothing else.

I’m trying to get Windows Media Player 11 to play h264 files with a .mp4 extension…

Install this, should do the trick.

http://www.cccp-project.net/

It’s just a video codec. Nothing mysterious about it. Best bet is to install the CCCP codec pack, and then you’ll be able to play pretty much anything.

Or…
Download VLC media player. That plays every format I’ve ever tried, straight off the bat with no faffing around installing obscure codecs.

Google g-spot (seriously), it’ll tell you specifically what codecs you need to play whatever it is you’re trying to play.

WMP isn’t very friendly with non-MS formats, mind. You might need a different player (VLC / Gom / mplayer2 etc).

It’s ffdshow tryouts you probably want, not ffdshow (not updated since 2006).

If you don’t mind trying another application, MPC-HC will play mp4,h264,mkv etc out of the box, and it looks like the old version of windows media player.

Ok well I’m a bit leary of installing this and that and the other and the next thing.. The point is that ffd show should bestow the capability to play h264 onto WMP shouldn’t it?

molgrips – Member

Ok well I’m a bit leary of installing this and that and the other and the next thing.. The point is that ffd show should bestow the capability to play h264 onto WMP shouldn’t it?

Yes, except that it is so old I don’t think it works with current version of media player.

Cougar – Member

Google g-spot (seriously), it’ll tell you specifically what codecs you need to play whatever it is you’re trying to play.

WMP isn’t very friendly with non-MS formats, mind. You might need a different player (VLC / Gom / mplayer2 etc).

It can be, it just needs the right codecs. WMP and MPC-HC are the ones to go for on Windows, as they will do proper hardware accelerated decoding out of the box (DXVA/DXVA2).

In the configuration for FFDShow, there should be an option “x264/AVC” which by default is disabled. You should be able to select a library (libAVCodec I think) that might enable you to play the files you’re interested in.

As mentioned above, FFDShow is out of date, and you should really be running a more recent version (for best results), included in the CCCP codec pack (or VLC)

Right, thanks folks.

This palaver is all to try and get DVDs onto the PSP for my daughter to watch during a 9 hour flight. I have to do it two-step because Handbrake took away the PSP preset and I can’t find out what the settings are. So I have to encode to an itnermediate form and then use PSP video. PSP video’s help files recommend using DVD decrypt as an intermediate step for DVDs but whilst it does it quickly it results in a file that takes PSP video about six times longer to convert. 3 hours for a 30 minute episode of Planet Dinosaur…