Every WMV file I have play fine if I just let them play normally until they finish, but the seek function in WMP8 and WMV9 doesn't seem to seek correctly with these files?

If I play a WMV then skip say 3/4 of the way through the file, the picture seems to 'melt' away and morph into the frame I skipped to but then freezes and won't play or takes ages to start playing? I seem to be able to slowly skip about from the start to 1/2 way though the files but after that they don't seem to seek properly. MPG and AVI files will seek properly?

I upgraded from WMP8 to WMP9 to see if the problem was WMP8, but the same happens in WMP9.

I tried loading then Saving and Reindexing some WMV files in Windows Media File Editor, but that didn't work. I don't really want have to re-encode and lose any quality or increase the size. I tried WinAVI to convert a 146mb WMV to DVD and it came out over 1GB but the seek works

So is there any utility that will 'fix' the seek problem in WMV files?

Solved the problem!

It was a combination of video driver (ATI Catalyst 5.6 has bugs with WMV files) and a few bad WMV codecs/files.

Installed Catlayst 5.5 and manually deleted the Windows Media 9 codecs and reinstalled the WM9codecs.exe and most WMV's play/seek correctly now but a few still had seek problems. Tried a few video repair utils and found running the troublesome files through ASF-AVI-RM-WMV Repair 1.82 fixed all the seek problems.

http://www.repairvideo.com/

So for now all issues solved!

I had this same problem recently.

Windows Media Player 9 and Winamp 5 had the same problem. I suppose it is codec related; however, installing new WMP 9 Codecs did not fix the problem. I've been searching the net for an answer and did not find any. The repair WMV program mentioned above didn't work

My final solution: I downloaded a player that works. MPlayer can play virtually any audio or video file with its own built in codecs. It has some useful features including Seek backwards and forward 10 sec, 1 min, and 10 min. It's open source and therefore has literally hundreds of GUIs. I like MPUI (comes with MPlayer and a classic GUI) you can download it here: http://www.free-codecs.com/download_...p?d=1575&s=562 if you don't like that one there are many other skins here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html