How to uninstall unwanted video codecs?

Alan Mintaka · Post by **Alan Mintaka** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 10:24 pm

Hi Everyone,
I reported problems capturing with MF6 to tech support and they told me to try uninstalling all unneeded video codecs. They gave me a list of codecs to keep, but no indication of how to uninstall the other codecs.

I tried CodecInstaller, which lists the codecs but does not uninstall them.

DxMan, which is supposed to be the wonder tool of codec management, lists ALL plugins on the system and does not show which are video and which are audio codecs. There must be hundreds of these things. I have no idea what to uninstall in that list.

Is there an easy way to do this that I'm missing. I tried the Device Manager properties listing for Video Codecs, which does have a "remove" option, but the codecs I removed were back when I restarted the machine - so no help there.

Can anyone recommend another course of action to uninstall the third-party codecs that tech support tells me might be causing capturing problems with MF6?

Thanks,
Big Al Mintaka

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 12:12 am

Please view:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/142731
Alternatively
control panel>sounds and audio devices>hardware>video codes>properties>...then highlight what you want gone and click remove.

Alan Mintaka · Post by **Alan Mintaka** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:49 am

Hi sjj,

Unfortunately, that KB article does not support Win XP and the Control Panel "Multimedia" icon does not exist in XP.

Also, this approach

"control panel>sounds and audio devices>hardware>video codes>properties>"

opens the same window as the Device Manager which I had described as:

"I tried the Device Manager properties listing for Video Codecs, which does have a "remove" option, but the codecs I removed were back when I restarted the machine - so no help there."

In addition, I have found that the Video Codecs | Properties tab does not show all video codecs installed in the system. DxMan and CodecInstaller show many more. Some of the ones the Video Codecs | Properties tab does show are DLL file names, with no obvious indication as to what codecs they are and/or which programs might need them.

So I'm still stuck on this issue. Tech Support advises me to remove unspecified codecs and there appears to be no way to do this in Win XP or with any of the tools I've found so far.

Anyone have ideas on this?

Thanks,
Big Al Mintaka

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 10:06 pm

Try this link:
http://codeccorner.com/aj.html

Alan Mintaka · Post by **Alan Mintaka** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:56 am

Hi sjj,
Thanks for the link to that site. It looks like a great resource for codecs.

I read the section on Windows XP problems and noticed a few suggestions to change the compatibility mode when running a video program.

I played with this a bit and found that I COULD get MF6 to capture! The only compatibility mode that worked was Windows 2000.

This has all sorts of implications, some of which may have to do with the codecs installed on my system. It could also mean that the default MPEG codec used by MF6 doesn't get along with XP.

The first time I tried capturing I used the default template DVD-HQ 4:3 (Dolby Digital). This turned out to have a bitrate of 7000 kb/s.

Next I went into the disc template manager and created a really loaded one: quality slider to 100, bitrate to 9800 kb/s, Dolby Digital 256K. 9800 kb/s was the max allowed. I noted that if I chose MPEG audio instead, the max bitrate was 8624 kb/s.

Anyway, at 9800 kb/s it captured OK for about 10 minutes. The preview display also appeared to be updating in real-time (when I try rates like that in DVD Workshop 2, the preview is choppy but the recording is OK).

This time when I clicked on "Stop Capture", a progress bar appeared as a buffer somewhere was flushed. It was not labeled "DV Transcode Buffer" or anything else. In the capture folder, no such buffer file was present - just the destination MPEG file, which steadily grew in size during the capture.

What to make of all this? I appear to have found a way to get MF6 to capture on my WinXP SP2 system in Win2000 compatibility mode, along with most of the video codecs that had been installed with application programs. I got rid of a lot of third-party codecs but I'm not sure I caught them all.

I'll head back to that codec tools site to see if I can find something that will help me isolate the codec(s) I really need. In the meantime, anyone else having this problem might want to try that compatibility workaround.

Have a good one,
Big Al Mintaka

PS: I had just sent a real nasty to tech support too. Oops!