Windows Vista Cannot View Thumbnails

When Windows Vista cannot view thumbnails this can be very annoying, spent ages searching for the answer? Tried all types of registry changes, but to no avail, this is the same issues I encountered, one of the articles even recommended rebuilding my computer, but as I’d only performed a clean install of Vista the previous day, which is not a five minute job this was not going to happen.

The first thing we need to do is back track, if you are using Windows media player as your chosen viewer for media files, it does not really come with a sufficient amount of media codes for playing many of the video files around today, so I downloaded a codec pack, it was some kind of lite version according to the site I downloaded it from, it looked as though it would give me support to every type of media format under the sun, but as this was the only change I’d made to an otherwise standard Vista build this looked like the culprit.

So this was uninstalled, of course I lost the ability to play most of my video files then.

Next I installed another Video player called Crystal, the good points about crystal are; it’s free and the more important part, it only downloads which media codecs it needs, and unlike Media player it actually downloads them.

So download and install Crystal, run one of your video files, allow Crystal to download any required codec files, once you’re happy the file is playing ok you can still keep Windows Media player as your default player, but two things should happen now, Windows media player should now be able to play the file and after a few seconds any compatible media files should change to a thumbnail of the movie.

Keep crystal installed, but you only ever need use it if you find any more media files that Windows media cannot play.

It’s very hard to pinpoint exactly which media codec or codecs cause the thumbnails to be disabled, but it looks as though the secret is, only download exactly what’s needed.

If Vista cannot view thumbnails let us know and we’ll post more possible solutions

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Computer adviser vista cannot view thumbnails article