How in the Tech

Detecting and fixing broken codecs

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 24, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Multimedia

Yesterday I wrote about encapsulating a video with a media player in order to guarantee easy playback for a less savvy computer user. Codecs are a necessary evil and historically not the easiest to install – though it has gotten better. An improperly installed or configured codec can really cause some havoc on a system; at best the video just won’t play and at worst, well it’s not pretty.

Codecs can get installed any number of ways, either directly by you or indirectly by being installed along side a separate piece of software. Therefor, a Windows install over time will accumulate dozens of audio and video codecs. In a perfect Microsoft world, everything continues to hum along nicely. Reality is, these codecs can stomp all over each other and simply make for a painful video experience. As it’s not always easily traceable as to when your situation went from good to worse, recovering is challenging.

Codec Sniper is a free Windows utility that lists all the installed audio and video codecs on the computer. Codecs are broken down and organized by classes, either DirectShow, Audio, or Video and most importantly, status. The binary status of either broken or ok quickly lets you know whether everything is on the up and up. Through the interface listing, broken codecs can quickly be removed – perhaps too quickly if you aren’t careful.

A general warning, Codec Sniper is not entirely a universal solution – you are going to have to get your hands dirty. For example, ideally you already know that the problematic video playback file is encoded in MP4. Using Codec Sniper to identify all the MP4 codecs and looking for any listed as broken is a great first step in solving your problem.