win8 Windows 8 RTM does not show MPG thumbnail preview

[Kenneth Micallef]

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?

[zhangm Supervisor]

Seems like Explorer handles MPEG-1 encoded files just fine, but not MPEG-2.

[Kenneth Micallef]

really? mpg1 preview works fine? i have mpg2 files....maybe i should convert them to mpg1

[francescob]

It has been on almost every tech news site for weeks: Win8 removed DVD playback, and that also means MPEG2.

[torrentthief]

i think mpeg1 has had it's patents expired. MPEG2 support has been removed therefore no thumbnail preview. A MCE pack will be available to download once win8 is launched though.

[Kenneth Micallef]

A MCE pack will be available to download once win8 is launched though.

are you sure?

[Darrian]

Um, yes?

[francescob]

• 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.

[Kyang]

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.

[AN90]

Thank you so very much Kyang! I have been going around for an hour looking for a solution to the absent thumbnails for mpg files in Winodws 8. Greetings from Buenos Aires.