I know nothing about CODECs and would appreciate any help you can give regarding the following software problem.

I have been having problems with a game which used embedded AVI files. Some of these files play, others cause a black screen and lockup of my computer. The publisher recommends some CODEC changes to remedy their problem.

The software is a slot machine game called Ghost Town published by PhantomEFX. The game uses AVI files for full window sequences like introductions, small windows like animated slot machine symbols and as overlays on other AVI files like moving ghosts over a background animation. They have a "fix" they call a CODEC patch - what it does I don't know but it doesn't do anything for me. Tech Support at PhantomEFX gives conflicting CODEC's and instructs you to unload "DivX", "K-Lite" and "CCCP" Codecs. They recommend using XPCodec but you have to uninstall AVISplitter.AX. However, users still have had problems with XPCodec - with FFDShow - a fuzzy blocky image if FFDShow is off and a black screen if its on.

I have CCCP Codecs loaded and if I try to play the AVI files in Media Player 9 or Classic Media Player I have problems with some files reported by the Haali Splitter. These errors are AVI: Stream has no index entries AND AVI: String count does not match stl contents. Note that these errors are with approximately 1/3 of the AVI files. The rest play great. I assume that if I can play these files that I have the proper CODECs for those files.

It seems to me that almost all the popular CODEC packs are off limits for this program. Any suggestions as to what CODEC pack I may be able to use? I run Win2000 SP4 and am unsure that the XP Codec Pack will run on my machine but if it will, does uninstalling AVIsplitter and doing something with FFDShow cripple my players. Obviously, I had the CCCP filters loaded for playing anime's and I would hate to remove them without having a Codec Pack that would still play them (MKV's).

Thanks

The codecs are not the problem. All those packs use ffdshow. The problem is those files. Some are clearly malformed AVI files. You should repair them with for example VirtualDub, Avidemux, or Avifixed.

This is a follow up to the initial posting. I got this response from PhantomEFX Tech Support Forum. It makes no sense to me in the context of everything else I've read but it may help someone else - hopefully YOU.

"The problem is AVI's in general. Unless you want that AVI to be 100 mb you gotta compress and encode them. Which means you gotta have decoders like divx and xvid. In Bonus mania and vegas we used a standard mpeg 4 encoding, but found that we couldn't quite get the type of picture we wanted so with Ghost Town and Gold Rush we switched to xvid. The problem with xvid is divx seems it always want to run a decoder when the file runs, unless of course the divxsm file is changed not to run xvid files which is what the codec patch does. We've just started using the industry standard binks video, which allows us to compress the files, but not acutally encode them for public viewing. The files created can only be played by our game or special video programs with a bink decoder installed. It's a given most companies don't have this issue but they also don't use movie files for anything other than intros and outros, we use them for every single animation and special effect. The one thing we can't do is go back and make all the video files from our previous games use bink video files, we just don't have enough time or resources." -- PhantomEFX Forum. Note that "Bonus Mania" and "Vegas" are earlier generations of the slot machine games available from this publisher. They both had a few of the problem AVI files and weren't immune from the problem.

The program CD contains an "Xvid" installer that I ran from the program CD. "Xvid" shows up in Windows Add/Remove Programs.

Asdf

Thanks for your response. I tried those 3 programs. Avidemux would crash and immediately close rather than open the AVI's. AVIFix would report that it found an error and fixed it but the AVI still wouldn't play. VirtualDub opened the files and displayed them but I was unable to save them in an AVI format that would play. I haven't tried all the options in VirtualDub but I'm not optimistic. Groping, I even tried DixFix++ to no avail.

I tried these programs on a few of the AVI files. Avifixed would open the file, find an error and claim that it fixed the file. However, afterwards I got the same file error as before. Avidemux would immediately crash and close when I try to open a file. VirtualDub would open and display the AVI's. However, I wasn't able to find a set of options which would let me save and then play the AVI's. I would still get the error message. I'm getting frustrated and more determined - am willing to try something else.

Thank you - with the hints I found a solution. ffdshow was using libavcodec to decode the files when it needed to be using Xvid. When I made that settings change and disabled Haali Media Splitter from supporting AVIs, everything worked. The game played and my anime's were unaffected.