A possible fix for unplayable Windows Media files

Dec 14, '05 07:08:00AM

Contributed by: callefjant

The fabulous video program VLC plays most of the video files that I come across. One exception is some, but not all, Windows Media files (with a .wmv-suffix). So, I go to the not-so-fabulous Windows Media Player 9, which also fails, saying something about that the streaming type is unknown. It doesn't have to be. Make sure that the path to the file you're trying to open does not contain any odd (non-ASCII) characters. That is, the name of the disk, the folders and finally the actual .wmv file must contain only ASCII characters.

In Swedish, for example, the word for harddrive is hårddisk, so if one has named the harddrive to what it actually is, Windows Media Player simply can't play files on it.

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