I used to be able to play *wmv video files just fine.

I haven't installed any new codecs lately, but out of the blue my windows media player (classic and wmp11) wont play *.wmv files. It does mpeg, avi and all the others just fine, just wmv. My VLC player plays them all fine. The only error message is "Cannot render file" in WMP classic, and error message C00D11B1 for WMP 11. No audio or video is shown, not even a scrambled picture.

Does anyone know why this happened or how to fix it?

I've had the K-lite codec pack installed when this happened. I uninstalled it, restarted and re-installed a fresh one. Same problem.
Uninstalled K-lite and installed XP codec pack 2.5.0.

I'm running windows xp pro.

thanks

The codec packs do not include the Windows Media codecs, so installing/uninstalling those will not make a difference.

The Windows Media codecs are included with Windows Media Player, but you can also re-install them separately. You can get them here:
http://www.codecguide.com/windows_media_codecs.htm

Error C00D11B1 has many causes. Just google it to find them.

If nothing helps, you could enable the WMV formats in ffdshow as a last resort.

The codec pack k-lite can cause this problem. That codec pack uses back dated windows media codecs (10 and 9). In mamy cases this will work, but not for wmv.

Uninstall the codec pack and forget about MP11. Use VLC.

THANK YOU
omg its been months trying to solve this and any time i googled it or asked anyone, i havent been able to fix it.
The windows media codec link you sent worked perfectly for both MPclassic and wmp11. I _would_ stick with vlc, but im used to all the shortcuts and the format of mpc :\

Before installation, i enabled all the wmv formats in my ffdshow and it didn't seem to work, but the Windows Media Format Runtime definitely did the trick. Microsoft should just throw that in there as the help message.

Thanks again for the quick response, and the perfect answer(s).