Windows Media Player 11 Language Track Problems

[cocoharley]

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this function of WMP (version 9 and later, I think) unless you regularly play Chinese (Hong Kong) VCDs, which usually have two language tracks (usually Cantonese and Mandarin), on your computer. Anyhow, there's this function, when (1) you are playing a video file on full screen and you right click or (2) not on full screen, you go to the Play menu, and you choose Audio and Language Tracks, you'll find Audio Track 1 (both channels), Audio Track 2 (left channel), and Audio Track 3 (right channel). If you don't make a choice, both language tracks will play at the default setting (Audio Track 1), which means at the same time (one on each speaker), which can be really annoying and confusing. If you do make a choice, the language track that you've chosen will then play from both speakers (and the track not chosen will not be played).

Well, I was using WMP 10 with no problems. I had all the codecs I needed and everything was fine. That was until I purchased an iriver clix and it was highly recommended that I used the latest version of WMP, which was (and still is) version 11, with my iriver clix. So I upgraded. After that, I was no longer able to choose my preferred language tracks when playing VCDs! The option simply did not exist anymore. When I went to Audio and Language Options, my only option was simply Audio Track 1. I tried to problem solve on the Microsoft website and supposedly, WMP 11 had the language track options. But for some strange reason, it wouldn't work for me. So I tried to roll back (is that the correct term?) to WMP 10, hoping that would solve my problem. Still, the options did not exist. And while I was playing a file, I was asked if I wanted to install WMP updates. I clicked yes, and it automatically installed WMP 11.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the codecs that I have, but I'm still not able to get that function to work!!! It's really annoying, because I have to revert to the primitive method of going to Play Control and moving the balance all the way to the left or all the way to the right. When I'm using regular speakers, it's still not half as bad, but when I'm using my headphones, it drives me crazy, because it makes me feel like I'm deaf in one ear and it gives me major headaches!

This isn't the only problem I'm having with WMP 11. Maybe it's just my imagination, but my computer's running a lot slower after I've installed WMP 11. WMP itself loads pretty slowly. Audio and video files load much more slowly than before and all the other functions like rip and burn are slow too. And when I'm running WMP 11, all other programs become slow. All these I can still endure, but the language track problem is driving me nuts!!!

Can somebody help me?

By the way, if it makes any difference, my computer's running on Windows XP (Home, SP2), using AMD Sempron Processor 2600+ 1.6GHz, and has a 1GB DDR-SDRAM total memory.

Edited January 15, 2007 by cocoharley