General Question

jlm11f's avatar

There's no more audio when I play files on my computer? The video works fine.

Asked by jlm11f (12416points) May 9th, 2010

So this is my mother’s computer. It’s a desktop and it runs Vista. She’s kind of technologically challenged so I keep having to fix things for her. Recently, the audio won’t work in VLC and Windows Media Player. The video works fine in VLC. I feel that the culprit is WMP (it’s version 11) but of course I could be way off, but no matter what I do I can’t get rid of it or reinstall. I installed K lite codec pack to be sure, and I restored the computer to an earlier point (I’ve also rebooted plenty of times), but no go. The type of file doesn’t matter, songs/movies/etc all the same.

Here’s how I know it’s not a speaker issue though, YouTube and other browser audio/video work fine. This computer has had virus issues in the past (and I’m sure it’s not completely clean yet). I’ve considered doing a factory restore but it does have a lot of files so I’m trying to keep that as a last option.

Any suggestions at all? Thanks for reading :)

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11 Answers

bob_'s avatar

Well, first things first: have you checked the volume control in Windows Media Player?

jlm11f's avatar

I have checked volume controls for everything, yes :)

bob_'s avatar

Mmm… is there any message in the Control Panel about some sort of conflict with the drivers?

Nullo's avatar

Try reinstalling VLC and/or WMP. Your codexes might also be out of date.

dpworkin's avatar

Try reinstalling the original audio driver, which may be OEM and not Windows.

MyNewtBoobs's avatar

If you download Spyware Doctor and Norton for free from Google http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html and run both of those it will tell you if her computer is clean.

First, restart the computer. If that doesn’t work, reinstall VLC. If that still doesn’t work, go to http://microsoftwindowscom.tt.omtrdc.net/m2/microsoftwindowscom/ubox/page?mbox=US_Windows_redir_downloads-browseOffsiteClick&mboxDefault=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fdisplaylang%3den%26FamilyID%3d50dff28b-8e0e-4b15-99a1-0d7b9ff3b795 and download Windows Media Player for Vista. Install it, and that will force a reinstall, in a manner of speaking. If none of that fixes it, you can do a system restore before going factory reinstall so that your files are safe. And there is a chance that with Vista, you can re-install the OS without wiping all the files, but I’d have to check.

dpworkin's avatar

or it might just be the audio driver. just sayin’.

jlm11f's avatar

I actually left home today, but I’ll try to arrange for these things to happen over the week. Couple of thoughts though, if it was the driver, why would youtube and other video/audio from the internet work?

Second, I did indeed uninstall and reinstall VLC (I should have mentioned that in the description) but that didn’t help. As for anti-virus, she had AVG until today and I uninstalled that and installed Avast today instead. I did a full computer scan too. There’s no sort of control panel conflict issue thing.

I’ll update as I do/know more. Keep the ideas coming guys. Thanks for all your help so far!

dpworkin's avatar

Oh, if you have any audio then it’s not a driver issue. Now I’m thinking it might be a codec issue or a bad dll that’s not getting replaced when you reinstall.

polycarpofjohn's avatar

K Lite codecs has its own Classic Media Player, so you have 3 media players on your computer. I installed K-lite mega codec on a computer that had WinDVD on it. K-lite crashed my Windows Media Player, and I had to take it off. There was a conflict with WinDVD.

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