James Bannan29 March 2007, 1:23 PM
Users are reporting ongoing frustration with Vista compatibility problems. The latest is difficulty playing back DivX movies, even with the latest DivX release installed.
Regardless of what you think of the operating system itself, there’s no doubt that Vista has, since release, languished under the shadow of compatibility issues.
In fairness, this seems to have had little to do with Microsoft. Many popular and regularly-updated applications simply haven’t caught up and been made Vista-compatible, despite the long beta and the two solid months between the release of Vista RTM and the consumer versions.
One major application which is still lagging behind is DivX. The latest version of the codec, 6.5.1, offers patchy playback support on Windows Vista and Media Player 11, and it’s officially unsupported.
When you install the DivX for Windows package on a Vista machine, it detects that you’re running Vista and gives a warning, outlining the various known problems of running DivX on Vista.
 DivX - Vista Warning |
The bundled version of the DivX Player (6.4.3) does work on Vista, but when you open a movie the Vista desktop will bomb back to Aero Basic – this also occurs with the DivX Web Player. It’s not a complete desktop or explorer crash though – the desktop switches back to Aero Glass once the Player is closed.
 DivX - Aero Crash 1 |
 DivX - Aero Crash 2 |
The included Divx Converter (version 6.2.1) doesn’t load at all, even if you use the Windows XP SP2 compatibility setting. It will ask whether you want to check for any available updates and will happily do so, but that still won’t get you anywhere.
 DivX - Updates |
Playback in Media Player 11 using the 6.5.1 codec is erratic, to say the least. DivX- and XviD-encoded movies will play back without stuttering, but there can be problems with using the timeline to jump to a particular point in the movie, with playback freezing for a while then going extra-fast to catch up to the audio. I haven’t encountered a complete application crash, however.
Interestingly, I’ve encountered similar playback issues using MP11 and DivX 6.5.1 on a dual-screen Windows XP SP2 machine, with MP11 open on the secondary screen. If you maximise or minimise windows over the top of the video playback, or even do anything that uses a bit of CPU time, video playback stalls and then catches up to the audio which is completely unaffected.
These playback issues don’t seem to be consistent from machine to machine however, and there’s little obvious link between why a high-powered machine would struggle while an integrated laptop purrs away happily.
The same is true of DivX movie playback in Vista Media Center. My early experiences with Media Center on Vista Ultimate with DivX were truly horrible – crashing, freezing and everything in between. Basically unwatchable. But then use exactly the same configuration on a different machine and it’s fine … go figure.
Users on various online forums have commented on the codec’s general instability on Vista, and a few alternatives have cropped up.
It seems that an earlier version of DivX – 5.2.1 – exhibits none of the stability problems shown by the latest release. Bizarre but true.
The bundled version of the DivX Player (2.5.5) still crashes Aero Glass when a movie is loaded, but otherwise it’s a much better experience.
Other users do away with DivX altogether and just install the latest stable XviD codec (1.1.2). You get full DivX/XviD playback in both MP11 and Media Center and there’s no Player to worry about. Thumbnail generation is also noticeably faster.
Links: