Audio crashes with mp3 VBR Sound in Win2000 SP3
 

Just as a hint for others who might come across this problem:

The ServicePack3 for Win2000 comes with a new version of quartz.dll. This version seems to be buggy and causes crashes in AVI playback (actually immediately on load/start) in bsplayer (all versions) as well as in WindowsMediaPlayer 6.4 and 7 and others. The only player that worked is my unloved DivXPlayer. The crashes occur with variable bitrate mp3 audio streams. I have the DirectX8.1b SDK installed and used the tool GraphEdit to investigate this problem. I found out: if I replace the quartz.dll (...\WINNT\System32\quartz.dll) with the previous version 6.3.1.881, everything works fine. This dll implements the AVI-Splitter DirectShow-filter which is responsible for dividing the audio- from the video-stream.

However replacing such system files in Win2000 is not easy because the system file protection won't let you. There are backup copies of quartz.dll in ...\WINNT\System32\dllcache and in ...\WINNT\ServicePackFiles\i386. One has to backup these copies outside the ...\WINNT path (all three may be different versions) and then delete all of them at once (in explorer search the whole WINNT directory for "quartz.dll"; then you can select and delete all at once). Only then it is possible to copy your own version to ...\System32.

Unexperienced users should rather uninstall ServicePack3 (or avoid installing it in the first place)

I hope this helps anyone,
Hugo

hey, thanx alot, I use XP and I had a problem that BSplayer just crashed and gave me an audio error. and I looked at my quartz.ddl version (6.4.2600) when I changed it to your version BSplayer works fine now!!!

BTW BSplayer is the best player I ever used