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Ian
10-18-2008, 07:31 PM
Not sure if anyone has any ideas on this or not, but I figured I'd ask anyway ...

We have a Sony digital video camera (the kind that records right to hard disc). As best I can tell, it creates MPEG files (they show up on my PC with a .mpg extension, anyway), yet for some reason Windows Media Player won't play sound on them.

If I use the video viewer that came with the camera there's sound, but nothing through WMP.

Any ideas?
BigRedDad
10-18-2008, 08:28 PM
Just a wild guess and nothing more without any information. It may be that you are missing the necessary audio codecs for the video. You would want to refer to your manual to see what format the video and audio are recorded in. You may have to install something.

Sorry I cannot offer more than that without more info on the camcorder.
DizneyRox
10-18-2008, 09:37 PM
A quick check and it seem that some of the Sony camcorders actually save in Dolby Digital 5.1. You might not have the necessary codec on your machine for that, or WMP doesn't support the codec for playback.

I use VLC Player for most of my audio/video files now. Seems to play just about everything.
dnickels
10-18-2008, 09:52 PM
I use VLC Player for most of my audio/video files now. Seems to play just about everything.

I was just going to type that when I saw your response. VLC Media player seems to be a lot less 'picky' about whether you've got the right codecs or extensions. I'd definitely recommend it.
brownie
10-20-2008, 07:25 AM
Try the VLC media player. I've been able to use it for stuff the Windows Media Player won't play. It's free, so you can't beat the price.
Ian
10-20-2008, 09:37 AM
Thanks ... I'll check it out!

It's just weird, because the file extension says .MPG, which certainly seems like it should play on WMP.

I guess maybe it's the Dolby thing. Kind of annoying, actually ...
DizneyRox
10-20-2008, 08:07 PM
MPG is just a container for AUDIO and VIDEO.

Much like AVI. You can have uncompressed video, DIVX, XVID, etc. Audio can be MP2, MP3 I've even seen AC3 audio in an AVI.

MPG is usually the video (MPEG-2) but I've seen MP2 and WAV audio in an MPG file. You are probably looking at Dolby audio in that one.

With regards to WMP, I think (I might be mistaken) that WMP really only support DirectX based codecs. I never really got that into WMP it has probably playing many types of files (probably because of that limitation). I use WinAmp 2.95 and then VLC Player. Cyberlink PowerDVD is my DVD player.