Playing music videos on Extended Desktop screen

[bernie]

I've done some further testing. I've added the following video filetypes to the playlist and they play perfectly on the external monitors:

.wmv (Windows Media Video)
.mp4 (iPod Video)
.3gp (mpeg-4)
.mpe (mpeg-2)

The filenames show up on the playlist screen, just like a singer's song request, when the files come up in rotation they play perfectly and upon completion return to the singers playlist screen. The behavior is no different from a regular karaoke track. The audience sees the videos on the external monitors just as they would the lyrics of a song. Excellent.

In other words, I don't have a problem with the feature itself, the monitors, graphics card, etc. The only problem is with avi files. I've evaluated known good files (directly captured by DV device, created by Windows Movie Maker, type-1 files, type-2 files, etc.) All of these files play using any media player I've tried... except for Hoster.

Could someone who uses this feature see if they too have a problem with avi files? It would be useful to know if this anomaly is unique to my setup or universal. Thanks.

[ddouglass]

Unrelated to Hoster I have had problems in the past getting WMP to play some AVI files. The only thing I could do to fix it was to reload the codecs.
Have you checked Microsoft to see if there are any updates for Movie Maker or WMP?

[gduns - with the Lord]

as far as .avi files, I added the codec from the divx website (free) and it handles all of then for me. Works with hoster and windows media.

[bobcox- with the Lord]

I believe he was talking about not being able to get video on desktop and tv at the same time.
two displays at same time, like when playing a kma file.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by bobcox

I believe he was talking about not being able to get video on desktop and tv at the same time.
two displays at same time, like when playing a kma file.

Just for AVIs. The rest are working.

[bryant]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

Just for AVIs. The rest are working.

Yup, avi.'s are definitely weird. My DJ program has troubke with some and different for each computer.
Sometimes it's even a conflict of two codecs as well, i.e., it can somehow grab the wrong one the first time.

Not sure how to uninstall a codec pack, but usually, the second pack tries to detect codecs for the first one, if any already installed, and tell you to delete that specific codec. But, then agan, I'm not sure if all packs work this way or easily detect other conflicting codecs.

I think what I did once was unistall every pack that I had and start from scratch on one particular pack.

[bernie]

Thanks, guys. I feel vindicated knowing it's the avi format that's problematic and not something obvious I've overlooked.

As a further test, I converted the avi's to wmv and sure enough, Hoster plays the converted files just fine. I might play around some more with the codecs, but in the interim, no avi's in the playlist during a show.