I recently upgraded to Windows 11, and now I'm having trouble playing many of my MP4 files in Windows Media Player. I get an error message that says "We can't open video. It uses unsupported encoding settings. 0xC00D3E84." I checked some of these videos in VLC, and they work fine; one of them uses the codec H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1).
It's odd because some videos with the same codec play fine in Windows Media Player. This makes me question whether it's genuinely a codec issue or if Windows Media Player is misreporting the problem. I also attempted to install the K-Lite Codec Pack (mega version), and after restarting my PC, the videos still won't work, although it appears that the codec is listed as installed now.
Can anyone help me understand what's going on?
For reference, my system specs are: OS Build: 26100.6584, Edition: Windows 11 Pro, GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER. I've made sure all my Windows and GPU drivers are up to date.
3 Answers
Have you checked if those videos are stored on an external drive? Sometimes Windows Media Player has issues accessing files from external drives due to permissions. Also, you could consider using MediaInfo to get detailed codec information. That might help pinpoint what's wrong with those files.
You're right that Windows Media Player can sometimes flag issues incorrectly. If you can provide the codec details using MediaInfo, we can help figure out if it's a specific flavor of H.264 causing the trouble. Different H.264 profiles and levels may or may not be supported, which contributes to these incompatibilities.
I’ll grab the codec info from VLC and share it here. Maybe we can narrow it down!
It sounds like you're dealing with a codec compatibility issue, which can happen with different versions of H.264. K-Lite Codec Pack is a bit outdated, so I recommend trying out the MadVR codec instead. You might also want to use VLC’s built-in converter to re-encode the problematic MP4 files to ensure they're fully compatible with Windows Media Player.
Yeah, using VLC to convert those videos can resolve codec issues. Just select 'Convert/Save' in VLC and pick a different format to see if that helps.
The location isn’t the issue, as it happens whether the video is on my SSD or hard drive. But I’ll definitely check MediaInfo to see if it reveals anything useful.