Old Avi files to play
 

I have some old videos with .avi format.

They are intact.

I could play them with Win98's windows media player, or whatever it was called.

Under Win7 I can not play them.

Any program you think might be able to play these?

VLC should be able to handle that stuff.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

I have a lot of old AVI files from the past .... they all play without a glitch in VLC.

I'd consider any video program which is not able to read .avi and is not a very specialized to only a very select few format as quite crappy...

About any video program easily read those.

Also with the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play those older AVI files in any player that plays video files. You would probably need the 64-bit version (KLCP 64-bit on the left) for Windows 7.

Not unless you're going to use a x64 player (such as the Media Player Classic HC that comes with the pack--it's what I use most of the time). Even the Windows Media Player in x64 editions of Windows continues to be a x86 program (last time I checked).

Media Player Classic: Home Cinema + ffdshow-tryouts . May need an extra codec or two at some point, but ffdshow takes care of most.

Actually, this seem to be quite the problem with newer OSes. I didn't really look for this specifically but since you raised my awareness of the problem I noticed, while searching for another problem, people talking about .avi files hanging explorer.exe in Windows 7 and newer.

How Microsoft can shoot themselves in the foot and badly do their job every single time baffle me.

The only fix I've seen on the subject was to disable previewing of files when using explorer. You know, that thing which give you a preview of files like photos or videos when you are browsing your files? Anyhow, it seems that there is no option in the contextual menus to fix this... But you can run any command prompt and type this to do it manually:

Hope this help someone. :)

I think Ffdshow has an option to choose which video file formats to preview (or none). Or you can edit the registry. Those problems depend on what third-party codecs you have installed. Sadly Microsoft provides very few bundled with Windows. And even Ffdshow is not bug free.

Just to clear a possible misunderstanding:
there are certain .avi files what are played, but some are not.

Thx for all suggestions, I'll try out some.


EDIT:
yep, tried out a different player, and it seems a codec-problem, what is ridiculous.

Video file formats such as .AVI are what in video encoding is called "container" format. But each one of these formats may contain media tracks encoded with different codecs (not all combinations are possible, each container is defined to support a set of codecs). Most of the time, the problem lies with lack of support for the codec used, not that the container format is not recognized--there are way more codecs than container formats.