M$ Office-friendly MPC-like player?

[FredThompson]

A while ago I mentioned problems with MPC "breaking" PowerPoint's ability to insert MPEG1 video into slides.

Does anyone know of a way to properly restore Win2K settings such that PowerPoint will work properly? (That was the original question and the answers...uh...didn't work...)

Alternately, can someone recommend a single-file player similar to MPC which will allow ffdshow overrides?

It seems there is something MPC does when it is made the default MPEG player which is NOT reset if WMP 6.4 or 7.1 are made the default player. I've searching through the M$ tech sites and registry settings hoping to come up with an answer. I'm stumped.

[celtic_druid]

No problems here, powerpoint and MPEG1 files works fine and I have Media Player Classic installed. It is also the default player for mpg's.

I am also like you running win2k.

[FredThompson]

Which version of PowerPoint are you using? The problem only happens when I try to embed mpeg into a slide. I'm using Office 2003, win2k sp4 with all updates and all updates for Office.

[celtic_druid]

Also running win2k SP4 with Office 2003.

I just went insert-->movies and sounds-->movie from file-->mpg.
No problems so far. Then I went slideshow-->view show and it played fine.

Windows is running wmp 6.4 (not associated with anything) and the latest 6.4.8.3 of mpc.

[FredThompson]

OK, I've dug deeper and this is a fairly common problem. Apparently, some commonly-used players will break the linkage for mplayer2. The common fix was to install MainConcept's codec. Perhaps M$ licensed from them so everything would work fine. The challenge is MainConcept doens't have playback codecs on their download page anymore. The nimo codec pack is supposed to include the original M$ MPEG codecs but it appears to be AWOL and the goal is really just to reinstall the M$ codecs, not add a bunch of others.

Can someone direct me to a source for the M$ codecs, prefereably packaged in some sort of installer?

[FredThompson]

OK, here's more info:

It looks like QuickTime Player is breaking the relationship between mplay32 (The MCI player) and it's DirectShow filter for MPEG-1. Reinstalling DirectX isn't fixing the problem.

All the linkage in the registry looks proper and I've overwritten the mciqtz32.dll copy in system32 with the one from dllcache. Still, attempting to open an M1V file with mplay32.exe brings what looks like an OOB error. The window states:

The instruction at "0x1c103099" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read".

Does anyone know how to fix this?