Mind Your Bit’ness - Codecs and Windows Vista x64
Over the weekend, I sat down to copy some videos off of my Flip Ultra camcorder and do a little video editing (if you’re not familiar with the Flip see my review over on The Full Catastrophe). Previously, I’d only used the Flip with our Mac Mini, but that machine is a bit underpowered for video editing so I decided to use my “game machine” which runs the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
When you plug the Flip into a system for the first time it automatically installs a codec package which allows you to decode the video format used by the camera. The installation process completed successfully and I copied a number of video files from the Flip to my local drive. In order to verify that the codec was working properly, I opened one of the videos in Windows Media Player and found that it played without issue. Everything was looking pretty good.
Since I wasn’t trying to do anything particularly fancy, I decided that I’d just use Window Movie Maker software that ships as part of Vista. It’s not the best editing package out there, but is totally suitable when you need to do some basic trim/re-arrange work. So I imported my videos into Movie Maker . . . only to find that it couldn’t decode the videos (I was getting audio, but no video). To the best of knowledge, both Media Player and Movie Maker use the same set of DirectShow filters for audio/video decoding so it made no sense to me that Media Player was able to play the video while Movie Maker was not.
It wasn’t until after I’d tried un-installing/re-installing the codec and rebooting a couple of times that I thought to look at the Task Manager.
Looking at the entries for Media Player and Movie Maker in the Task Manager made it pretty obvious what was happening. Note the *32 that appears as part of the image name for Media Player in the task list. This indicates that Media Player is a 32-bit application that is being run on top of the operating system’s 32-bit emulation layer. In contrast, Movie Maker is a true 64-bit application.
I haven’t dug into this yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn to that the Flip codec package is 32-bit only. This would explain why the 32-bit Media Player was able to decode the videos while the 64-bit Movie Maker was not.
I was a bit leery when I first installed 64-bit Vista — I was sure that I was going to run into all sorts of compatibility problems. However, I have to say that it has been working pretty smoothly for me for the past year. Every once in awhile though a subtle issue like this one will sneak up on me and leave me scratching my head for awhile. It’s because of things like this that I typically counsel friends/family against installing Vista x64 unless they really know what they’re doing. For someone that doesn’t know where to look, an issue like this can drive you mad.
In the end, I simply moved my videos over to another 32-bit machine that I have and did my editing there. In the long term I guess I need to figure out what codec the Flip is using and find a 64-bit version of it.
Leave a Reply