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markjones05

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2003
935
0
Brooklyn, NY
I have .wmv's that i know can work but will not play on my computer with windows media player or vlc. in windows media player i get and error message saying Cannot open the file. Verify tha the path and filename are correct and try again. And in vlc the image is just green and distorted. Is there a plugin or codec i am missing? Please help.
 

mad jew

Moderator emeritus
Apr 3, 2004
32,191
9
Adelaide, Australia
Strange. My first thought was that it may be WMV10 in which case you can only play it with WMP 10 on Windows unfortunately. However, generally VLC will tell you this and it won't show anything, especially not a green screen.

Maybe give MPlayer a whirl (free download) but I doubt it'll do any better. :(
 

imjmn

macrumors newbie
Aug 28, 2005
6
0
I have had problems and WMP would not play files it should. I downloaded WMP again from their site and re-installed and things worked. Go figure??
 

markjones05

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2003
935
0
Brooklyn, NY
Ive done both and so far nothing has worked. Mplayer doesnt even play the wmv's that do work in Windows media player...
 

jrbsman

macrumors member
Jul 4, 2005
42
0
Can't get WMP

Thought this looked like a good place to post as my question is related. I have been trying to get WMP but when I try to download it from the Microsoft website it is a .bin file and the trial version of Excel tries to open it which doesn't work because the trial period is over. (Which is something else I have to fix because I have a hard time believing my 30 day trial finished in the 4 days I've had the laptop.) So any tips on how to deal with .bin files? Thanks in advance.
 

jrbsman

macrumors member
Jul 4, 2005
42
0
Where is Stuffit?

superfunkomatic said:
use a decompression utility like stuffit expander, it will open the bin file for you - it's basically a compressed archive file like a .zip file. then you can reinstall.


Where is Stuffit on my system or how can I select to use it? Excel want to automatically open it and when I ctl-click and go to "Open with" I cannot find the expander. I've searched using Spotlight and I still can't find it. This is seeming like one of those stupid little things I can't figure out.
 

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
superfunkomatic said:
use a decompression utility like stuffit expander, it will open the bin file for you - it's basically a compressed archive file like a .zip file. then you can reinstall.
Correct recommendation--wrong reason. The .bin format is known as MacBinary. It is a technique used to encode dual-forked Mac files for archive and transport on single-forked file systems. Although some files are compressed prior to MacBinary encoding, the two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It is quite often the case that a .bin file will decode into a file of essentially the same size.
 

jrbsman

macrumors member
Jul 4, 2005
42
0
I got it

Well I got it to work, downloaded Stuffit and used it and got everything installed. Took me a while though because I found another small glitch. Documents are sometimes not showing up on the Desktop. This includes files I've downloaded, and extracted. The only way I knew they were there was when I used Stuffit to select a place to extract the file to it showed a bunch of files on the desktop that I couldn't see other wise. Any suggestions would be great.
 
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