For users who have been having trouble getting videos to play, I found something out the other day and wanted to share.

I have been having consistent problems with videos freezing and have worked in-depth with richard to come to a solution. I found out that if a video freezes I am able to stop the video and hit play again and it will function correctly. This is in the downloadable player or in windows media player. I havent had any problems in the online theater.

For some reason, if I close the thing and re-open it will continue to be frozen.

If anyone is having similar problems, I hope this helps.

---

Reply from Richard Rost:

Scott, thanks for sharing. I plan to COMPLETELY get rid of the Windows Media versions of my videos eventually. ALL of the Online Theater videos have been converted over to MP4 files that play just beautifully in the Flash player and have been extensively tested on numerous devices (all major PC browsers, Android, iPad, etc.) without any problems. The WMV files are still included with my CDs and downloadable Amicron Video Player because my software uses the Windows Media Plugin to play them... but I'm looking for a solution to get rid of that too.

Microsoft has been CONSISTENTLY BAD with their codec support with Windows Media Player. I had tons of problems when Windows Vista came out a few years ago, and tons more problems now with 64-bit Windows 7. They expect developers to keep re-converting their video files to remain compatible with the newest versions of Windows Media Player and they don't include support for old codecs. (A codec is a form of file compression). Because of this, I'm dumping Windows Media completely as soon as I get around to it and going with MP4 which is a more universally accepted/compatible format. The files are a little larger than WMV files, but I'd rather deal with longer downloads and fewer courses on a CD than all of these codec problems every couple of years.