Unable to Download an Appropriate Decompressor
My wife is currently busy editing video using Adobe Premiere. Last night, to her horror the project loaded into Premiere but all of her video clips were gone, replaced by blank black boxes. It looked like all the clips she had been working on for weeks were completely erased from her computer!
The first thing I did to troubleshoot the problem was check the source files. Her .avi files were still intact on the PC but wouldn't run in Windows Media Player 9. The two errors I received were "Unable to Download an Appropriate Decompressor" and "The file format is invalid". I tried to install new codecs to make the video run but to no avail. The next thing I figured is perhaps there was WMP file corruption - I tried installing Windows Media Player 10 to fix the problem. Unfortunately, the codec error kept popping up.
I found the solution in the most unlikely of places. I downloaded and installed the Ace Mega CodecS Pack - Professional Edition and ran a tool called GSpot. This tool allows you to identify and diagnose codec problems within .avi files.
The root of the problem was a program called WinAVI Video Converter. It was recently uninstalled on her system and removed a core .dll (q3drv.dll) which was associated to the Sony DV Video Codec (the FourCC code is "DVSD"). Reinstalling WinAVI reinserted the .dll on her system and fixed the problem. At some point in the future, I'll surgically remove the .dll dependency.