videos wont play what to load and start over?

[Sparkynutz]

I built a new computer about 6 months back and had problems playing videos right off the bat. on my old computer with xp sp1 I dl all the updates and dl VLC player from download.com and every video I tried so far plays fine in either vlc or wmp or both. on my new computer I loaded vlc player and most of the stuff worked, but recenly none of them would play in either player. I am thinking it was a recent windows update that messed it up but im not sure. I tried uninstalling wmp11 and went back to wmp9 and my videos worked for a day and the next day none worked again. I didnt load anything, just checked my email and watched some videos on the front page of yahoo.
I tried loading wmp11 back on, uninstalling and re-installing VLC player, tried a bunch of different codec packs.
I am planning on starting over, reformatting and loading windows fresh and only the programs I need.
I searched forever trying to find out what I need to load to be able to watch yahoo video's, the videos I have saved and later be able to take video's off my camcorder and turn into dvd's.
I cant find a straight answer to what I need to load and where to get it. it shouldnt be that hard. but I sure must be looking in the wrong places and getting frustrated.

I have a quad core cpu, abit ip35 pro mobo, 2gb memory, and Nvidia GeForce 7300LE video card

here are the details on one of the videos i was trying to play-
General tab-
type of file windows media audio / video file
opens with windows media player
Summary tab-
opens with

width 400 pixels
Heigt 300 Pixels
Protected No
Duration 1:20
Bitrate 372kbps
Audio Sample size 16bit
Channels 2 Stereo
audio sample rate 44khz
data rate 300kbps
video sample size 24bit
Stream name video 2

other than that I dont know how else to find what type of file it is

the sound always works just not the video and when I first got the computer running the video was almost pitch black with a real little bit of the picture showing in blue. I have no idea why it all of a sudden started working back then, but now it shows nothing for video.
please help!

thanks,
Ryan

 

[Rainman21]

Did you try the Divx or Xvid codecs? How about system restore to go back before it happened then install software or windows updates one at a time until it stops working again to find out which one caused the problem?