Viewer Pane will not show preview of realplayer files

Help & Support
1

I'm running DirOpus 12.7 on Windows 10 - 64bit.

My Viewer Pane seems to work fine for just about every video file extension (e.g., .avi, mp4, mov) but I can't figure out how to get it to do previews for realplayer files (e.g., .rm, rmvb).

Any thoughts on how I can get the realplayer files to work in the Viewer Pane?

Thanks,
Rob

2

You'd probably need to find and install a splitter (aka demuxer) DLL and any codec DLLs required for the RealPlayer video and audio encoders (although you may find something like FFDShow already includes some or all of them, perhaps).

Get them playing in Windows Media Player first, then worry about Opus, since getting them to play at all is the hard part, with it being such an old and rarely used format today.

3

I'm sure you're right and that's what I've tried to do already.

I downloaded and installed the following from Source Forge:

  • Media Player Classic Home Cinema splitters
  • Guliverkli2 splitters
  • ffdshow

None of the above worked to get .rm files to play in Windows Media Player.

Afterwards, I downloaded and installed the Media Player Codec Pack from https://www.mediaplayercodecpack.com/ . That at least enabled me to play .rm files in Windows Media Player.

Now that I have .rm files playing in Windows Media Play, I'm stumped on how to get the View Pane in Directory Opus to play them.

Do you have any other ideas on what I might try now that I have the real play files playing in Windows Media Player?

Thanks,
Rob

4

There may only be a 32-bit codec, or the codec pack you used may have only installed one.

The Movie plugin in Opus uses 64-bit codecs, but you also have the option of using a 32-bit player in the preview panel.

  • Go to Preferences / Viewer / Plugins.
  • Disable the Movie plugin. (You may be able to enable it later, but it might get in the way. So let's disable it, at least temporarily, to keep things simple.)
  • Configure the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin.
  • Add .rm or the extension you're trying to play to the Generic ActiveX 32-bit line near the bottom.

If that doesn't work, it might need some extra registry settings to associate the Windows Media Player ActiveX control with the file format. If you need those let me know and I'll do some digging.

  • Note: There is also a "Windows Media Player" line in the "Preview Handlers" section at the top of the list. The WMP ActiveX control and WMP preview handler are two separate things. The preview handler might be worth a try as well, but probably only on earlier versions of Windows, because Microsoft have completely broken the WMP preview handler in Windows 10 and show no signs of caring or fixing it. The WMP preview handler is what File Explorer and Outlook normally use to play videos, so if File Explorer can play videos then it's worth a try but if it doesn't work there then it'll also be broken in Opus.
5

The Windows Media Player preview handler appears to work again after the Windows 10 update to build 1803.

At least in Opus. It still doesn't seem to work in Explorer, for some reason.