Divx 6 breaks Flip4Mac WMVPlayer

Question

Anyone else experience that the Divx 6 codec seems to break WMVPlayer's ability to playback .wmv files in QuickTime Player (Pro)?
- Craig

Answer 1

I can confirm that Divx 6 does indeed break Flip4Mac, but only for a certain type of WMV video media.
If the WMV file was encoded with Microsoft's old MS-MPEGv3 codec (aka Divx 3), Flip4Mac chokes on it with Divx 6 installed. Apparently, codecs that are ordinarily designed to playback Divx 3, 4, 5, and 6 video in regular avi files also get involved with Flip4Mac when they sense a compatible codec present in a WMV file when Flip4Mac decodes it Quicktime, as if they were joining Flip4Mac in the decoding chores. If the WMV file was encoded with regular WMV 7, 8, or 9 codecs, Divx codecs don't get involved and Flip4Mac will playback those files fine even with Divx 6 present.
Other codecs designed to play Divx video don't exhibit this problem when installed with with Flip4Mac, including FFusion, 3ivx, and oddly enough, the recent Divx Fusion beta 3. They will still get involved in the decoding process when they sense a Divx codec present in a WMV file, but work just fine with Flip4Mac. You would never know unless you looked at Quicktime's get info screen to see the actual video codec being used. Only the official Divx 6 breaks it, and again, just for older Divx 3 encoded WMV files.
So the solution for now is to get rid of Divx 6, and reinstall Divx Fusion beta 3 if you still have it, or install FFusion and/or 3ivx D4 4.5.1 for avi playback, although with the last two, there's a good chance avi movies will have no sound, unfortunately. (A long standing Quicktime bug for decoding mpeg layer 3 movie sound, which the majority of avi's have). Divx Doctor II comes to the rescue and fixes that in almost all cases. Or you can use dependable VLC for Divx avi file playback.
Until either Divx or Flip4Mac cries uncle and fixes the conflict, that is.
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