Sunday, February 04, 2007

Public Service Announcement

As I've said a billion times in the last two or three days, I've been watching the Caribbean Series on MLB.TV. I haven't been listening to it, however, because there has been no sound. I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to fix it, but nothing worked. This morning I continued to try to figure it out. Apparently, I am not the only one who was having trouble with the audio in video clips or streaming feeds judging from the various questions on computer boards. Troublesome sites varied from BBC.com to CNN.com, but all had the same see-video-no-sound problems.

It appears that there are issues with Windows Media Player 11 (issues with a Windows program? No way!) and that WMP 11 can be missing the appropriate audio codecs (codecs are what converts data into sound or video or something like that.) I'm willing to bet that many people have "upgraded" their WMP to 11 over the off season and this will be a common problem for MLB.TV, so I wanted to let MLB.TV subscribers know what I did in case it happens to them. I downloaded the Ace Mega Codec Pack 6.03 which contains more codecs than anyone can use, I'm sure. It's freeware, so it isn't like it's illegal or anything, but for some reason all of the US links were broken, so I had to download it from Romania, which was a pretty long process. Anyway, a couple of restarts later and voila! Sound!

I'm going to email customer support for MLB.TV and tell them this story in case they feel compelled to be competent for once and help people troubleshoot this problem. I'm also going to repost once the season starts (if I remember.) I hope this helps someone!

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