No video preview in thumbnail view.....?

[wise monkey]

Hi everyone, I'm having a problem with getting some avi / divx files to show a video preview when I view them in thumbnail mode. I have quite a big list of divx files that all show the opening frame of each clip. However, some of them show no preview at all and just show the media player icon instead. I've looked all over the net for answers but can't find them. Could anyone please help me out? I've tried going into folder options and changing file types etc but Im still having the same problem. Cheers in advance

[jordi2k]

There is a known problem especially with AVI files often causing previews to not load up or in some cases crashing explorer when you try to open a file..

Windows XP Explorer has a 'feature' to provide a preview in the Details box on the left of the file you have selected, if it�s supported. Image files, HTML pages, video clips, MP3s, etc are all previewed (even with the folder view open).
If you have a large movie clip and it either is corrupt (ie. no index from a partial download) or it uses an unsupported codec, then Explorer tries to load the whole file. This can slow your computer a lot and prevent deleting/renaming/moving/etc the file until it�s finished.

Simply do the following steps:
1) Open a command window (Start->Run, type in 'cmd' hit enter)
2) To remove image preview, type and hit enter
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
3) To remove media preview, type and hit enter
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll

NB: To re-enable any of these do the same without the '/u' command.

[jordi2k]

On another note:

Well windows seem to have a REALLY big problem when it comes to reading AVI files. It seems that when you click on an AVI file in explorer, it'll try to read the entire AVI file to determine the width,height, etc. of the AVI file (this is displayed in the Properties window). Now the problem with Windows is that if you have a broken/not fully downloaded AVI file that doesnt contain this info, Windows will scan the entire AVI file trying to figure out all these properties which in the process will probably cause 100% CPU usage and heavy memory usage.

To solve this problem all you have to do is the following:

1. Open up regedit
2. Goto HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shellex\PropertyHandler
3. Delete the "Default" value which should be "{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}"

Voila! Please not that this will no longer provide you with the windows properties displaying the AVI file information such as width, height, bitrate etc. But its a small price to pay for saving you resources.

[Props to tweakxp.com]

[wise monkey]

Cheers for your replies Jordi.

I tried the command you posted above but it kept giving me a message saying 'bad command name or file' (or something like that)

I installed the latest version of DivX player and I can now view all thumbnails perfectly. I think you kinda got the wrong end of the stick with your reply though. My pc wasn't crashing or freezing up, its just that I prefer the view to be in thumbnail mode so I can see the opening frame as opposed to list, detail, icon etc

Cheers anyway :)