Can't play video received by e-mail

[Lanny]

My mother just recently upgraded to Win7 from Vista. Outlook07 no longer
plays media files (wmv, avi, etc) that others send (fwd) to her. It worked
fine until the upgrade.

When I single click the attatchment, it brings up the preview player. But
when I hit play the image just goes black.

If I double click the attachment,it launches WMP with an empty screen, and
just sits there.

Any help would be greatly apprectiated.

Thank You

 

[VanguardLH]

My mother just recently upgraded to Win7 from Vista. Outlook07 no longer
plays media files (wmv, avi, etc) that others send (fwd) to her. It worked
fine until the upgrade.

When I single click the attatchment, it brings up the preview player. But
when I hit play the image just goes black.

If I double click the attachment,it launches WMP with an empty screen,
and just sits there.

What happens when you SAVE the attachment to a file on your hard disk and
then double-click on that newly created file to play it?

 

[Lanny]

What happens when you SAVE the attachment to a file on your hard disk and
then double-click on that newly created file to play it?
.

Nothing happened. But I fianlly found some information from the online WMP
help files. Evidently windows wasn't starting the "media server"??.
Unfortunately, I forgot the details, and as it's not on my computer, I only
get to work on it when she lets me!

Thanks for trying though.

 

[VanguardLH]

Nothing happened. But I fianlly found some information from the online WMP
help files. Evidently windows wasn't starting the "media server"??.
Unfortunately, I forgot the details, and as it's not on my computer, I only
get to work on it when she lets me!

Thanks for trying though.

Outlook doesn't open any attachments. It is obviously just an e-mail
client, not a word processor, spreadsheet, database, audio player, DVD movie
player, or whatever other filetype might get attached to an e-mail. If you
save the file to a disk file then Outlook passes that file to whatever
program is associated with that filetype. If you tell Outlook to Open the
attachment, it still has to pass a file to the handler program which means
Outlook has to create a temp file to pass.

Since double-clicking on the saved file doesn't open WMP (with or without an
error when it then tries to play that file) then WMP isn't associated with
that filetype. Did you go into WMP's filetype options to check if it was
associated with that filetype? Did you load WMP and use its File -> Open
menu to see if it could load and play that saved disk file? If WMP cannot
play the file then perhaps the file was corrupted before attached to the
e-mail, got corrupted when encoded and attached to the e-mail, or its
content isn't what is claimed based on the filetype. Does the same file
that got attached to the e-mail play okay on the sender's host? If they
resend that same e-mail but to themself, can the sender extract that
attachment to a disk file and play it?

Since you can't even get the file loaded into WMP when you have saved it as
a disk file after extracting it from an e-mail, this isn't an Outlook issue.
It's a problem with your OS setup, filetype associations, or possibly WMP
*and* you said that you moved to Windows 7.

The Microsoft community for Windows 7 is found at:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/w7itpro