Windows 8 RTM does not show MPG thumbnail preview

By Kenneth Micallef
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Kenneth Micallef

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I am running windows 8 ent x64 and my mpg video files appear as an icon instead of a preview!

Windows 7 has no problems displaying the mpg thumbnail previews....can it be that MS removed the MPG decoders since windows 8 ent has no support for media center?

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francescob

Posted
Posted

  • The media center pack must be purchased, it's not just "available to download".
  • Actually nothing is downloaded, it's already present in your Windows 8 install and activated through an additional product key
  • The Windows Media Player in Windows 8 still doesn't play DVDs after you install the Media Center pack
  • Only Media Center (or third-party applications, most of which already play DVDs or MPEG2 files with their bundled codecs) will play the DVD
  • When you install and use Media Center, even only for playing DVDs it also installs and enables additional always-on services and that's just additional slowdown on your machine

Better to just install another player and ignore the thumbnails. It's not worth installing media center or a whole codec pack just to play MPEG2 files or DVDs.

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Kyang

Posted
Posted

I'm using this to get thumbnails for nearly everything:

http://www.babelsoft.net/products.htm

It isn't a codec pack or anything (AFAIK), so it won't allow you to actually play the files, but it does allow you to get the thumbnails.

There's an eight second video on that page that shows a little bit on how you get it working after install.

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