Bonjour mes amis. OK that's as good as it gets these days - I used to be quite fluent
🙂 Next bit is a bit too techy for my French ability.
OK - codecs. I think I've got this nailed. I assume you are using Windows and we are talking about a ".avi" file. Otherwise you will need advice from someone a bit more qualified than I am...
As I understand it, the codec (audio or video) is a piece of software used by media recorders and players for
compressing/
decompressing AV files. If you do not have the correct ones installed for the file you are trying to play you will lose sound or vision or it will not play at all.
Now my stepson (Rick btw) advised me to use a program called AviInfo (
Download from here - I think it's the correct version) to check which codecs the avi file uses. Install Avi Info, right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select aviinfo. This should then bring up a window which gives lots of details about the file including the codecs.
Once you know what those are do a search on Google, Yahoo, Jeeves or whatever search engine you favour for "***** video codec download" (***** being the name of the codec). Some sites may do bundles of these for use with Win98, WinXP etc. Then install the codec following the instructions on the download site and try to play your file again.
You can check to see which codecs you have installed in Windows under "Multimedia Properties". I can't remember the correct way to launch this window but if you do a Windows help search for "codecs" you should get to it from there.
Sorry to be so long winded but I've tried to cover everything I know. I hope this helps.