Fix your sound/video issues! [5231]

[FthrJACK]

SOUND

If like me you have an audigy card, you will no doubt have booted into vista to a lot of nice eye candy.. and silence or chopy distorted sound ending in silence. Usually causing a lot of applications like movie players and even parts of Windows Explorer to crash (sound control for example)

After trying many drivers, several "custom tweeked" sets just for Longhorn - which may have worked on previous builds, i found the only drivers that seemed to do the job was: Creative Driver Version 5.12.06.1161 install them and overwrite any existing drivers.

reboot

sound may still not be working, open control panel > sound. Click the "Defaults" button and make sure they are all set your card, you may even have to set them to something else if you have the option, save, reopen and put them back. Go to the speaker control and, for me anyway, i found my speakers wouldnt work if i had it set to anything other than stereo. you might get away with, or have to set it to 5.1 or whatever speakers you have depending on your system and what exact Audigy card you own.

Go to creatives site, and in the downloads > software section download the control panel for audigy cards, its at the top of the list. you may or may not have use for it though.

Reboot again

ok, should now work, fingers crossed.

Once you have your sound working, try not be tempted to open the sound controls, as if it crashes you are looking at loosing your sound again until you reboot to fix, though only a slight chance why mess?

HEADPHONES/MIC's

I have yet to get my USB headset to work (Error Code 10 - device cannot be started), it worked once but the mic wouldnt work on it and the sound carried on comming out of my speakers too.. seems the Defaults part of the sound controls still have a long way to go, but then they are new to Beta2

My desktop mic.. now if anyone figures this out let me know, i got it working, BUT it has to be enabled in the speaker settings, not muted like normal on windows. However doing this means that it is always turned on and when you speak you are going to hearyourself feedback out of your speakers unless you keep the volume low on them. Messing with the default options doesent seem to have an effect.

VIDEO

I also had issues with shadow effects staying on screen sometimes, seems to have stopped doing this on its own. if you get it, its easy fixed, hit ctrl alt del, and then select task manager option. When the desktop reloads it should be gone - this is faster and easier to do than restarting explorer... well you have to do it anyway to open the task manager

If you are having other issues you might want to to go to ATI's website (if you have an ATI card that is) and download their Beta Windows Vista Drivers. i found that installing them stopped the effects working though and i had to roll back my drivers after rebooting, the default drivers arent too bad.. but i have some issues with shadows in some games, nothing game stopping though.

Codecs... boy dont get me started. I also had issues with some movie formats not playing, even some sound formats... like .wma and .wmv being the main culprits!! the download for these codecs from MS wont install on longhorn without a registry hack. but i thought.. ill install a codec pack anyway and see. So i installed my old fave ACE MEGA Codecs, but this stopped Quicktime player working - latest quicktime player actually looks pretty nice under Vista too, even though i hate the thing.

Also seemed to make a few other issues of its own and yet fix others... sigh, instead of trawling through ACE control panel and finding just which drivers to enable or disable... download Video LAN player as it has its own codec support and will play .wmv and just about anything else you throw at it.

If anyone else has any experiances or tips please post

Edited October 23, 2005 by FthrJACK