The few weeks ago, I turned my TV on and it wouldn’t come on. The red light in front just kept flashing until it went out and the “Lamp” light came on. Oh great, my spouse had just took off on a military deployment and now I am without TV.

I immediately logged onto my laptop to typewrite my husband, who just insisted we buy a LCD HDTV three years ago. I told him that his “awesome” television is broken and now I have no husband and no TV either.

You have to love current technology because the next thing I know, he wrote back and told me he bought the extended warranty on the Sony HDTV. The extended warranty only lasts 4 years so I knew we were pushing it.

I also knew the paperwork was concealed somewhere with all the rest of the significant papers we had. After shuffling through documents for an hour, I eventually found it in an unopened box from our move. I opened it up and found the date of our purchase, almost 3 months shy of four years. YES! So I called Sony and let them know the HDTV model I have and my purchase code.

They set up a local electronics place to come to my residence, make positive it was the lamp and then exchange it. They even gave me an appointment day and time. I waited around all day for the tech to come to my home the day of the repair but he never showed up.

Do you know how bothersome it is to go from a 52″ HDTV to no high definition 19″ television? It’s quite dissatisfying. I called the electronics Co. and ask them what happened. They gave me another appointment and apologized, which was good, everyone makes mistakes.

Nevertheless, the next appointment never happened either. Then I called again and they said that they just went ahead and ordered the lamp. They said the lamp would arrive in two days. Three days afterward, there was still no lamp.

It wasn’t until virtually 2 weeks later that they finally got to my home with the lamp. The two techs just took off the front access panel to the TV, unscrewed the lamp frame, and replaced it. It took almost five minutes.

I could have certainly ordered the lamp myself and fixed it more than a week ago. I will definitely remember that for the next time my loved high definition television’s bulb goes out.

Because Windows Media Player is the default media player on all Windows operating systems, PC users experience a myriad of problems with the program in accordance with their system, hard drive, registry, or hardware.  One problem that is often run into with Windows Media Player is problems with the soundcard, in which case you cannot hear the music or sound files to videos on Windows Media Player.  In this article, you will learn how to troubleshoot and hopefully repair Windows Media Player soundcard problems.

Checking for Sound Devices

A first and important step to diagnosing and solving your Windows Media Player soundcard problems is to make sure that you have a sound device installed on your PC.  If you don’t have one, just install one.  Usually Windows will automatically detect the new hardware and install the software drivers, but if not, run the Add Hardware Wizard by going to Start > Control Panel > Add Hardware.

Use of Sound Device

Are you running other programs while running Windows Media Player?  If so, the other program may be using the sound device also, and that prevents Windows Media Player from accessing it.  Close all other programs so that Windows Media Player is the only one running and try to play a file again.

Corrupt Software Drivers?

Corrupt software drivers are not always detected on your PC, and thus you are sometimes not alerted or aware that there is a problem.  Try reinstalling the most recent software driver for your sound device.  You can do this by scanning updates on the Windows Update website or going to the sound device manufacturer’s website.

DirectX Problems

If you have an old version of Microsoft DirectX on your PC, it may be incompatible with the updated versions of the hardware features on your sound device.  You can eliminate this problem or option by going to the DirectX web page and installing the most current version.

Sound Device Troubleshooter

If you are still experiencing problems listening to media on your Windows Media Player, try opening the program, going to Tools > Options and clicking on the “Speakers” tab and selecting Advanced.  Choose the Hardware tab and select Troubleshooting after you’ve selected the proper hardware for your PC.  This will take you through several other options and help you figure out the problem with Windows Media Player.

It is one of the most platform-independent media players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU, Linux, BeOS, and BSD.

The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries; on the Windows platform, this greatly reduces the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. Many of VLC’s codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux by using the libdvdcss DVD decryption library.

Note: download vlc player on http://www.downloadvlcplayer.org/

VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded. (For example, files still downloading via BitTorrent, eMule, or Gnutella) [citation needed]. It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. This is because it is a packet-based player. The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user’s operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images. VLC supports all audio and video formats and all file formats supported by libavcodec and libavformat. This means that VLC can play back H.264 or MPEG-4 video as well as support FLV or MXF file formats “out of the box” using FFmpeg’s libraries. Alternatively, VLC has modules for codecs that are not based on FFmpeg’s libraries. This feature is not unique to VLC, as any player using the FFmpeg libraries, including MPlayer and xine-lib-based players, should be able to play those formats without the need for external codecs. VLC is one of the free software and open source DVD players that ignores DVD region coding on RPC-1 firmware drives, making it a region-free player. However, it does not do the same on RPC-2 firmware drives. VLC media player has some filters that can distort, rotate, split, deinterlace, mirror videos, create display walls, or add a logo overlay. It can also produce video output as ASCII art. VLC media player can play high definition recordings of D-VHS tapes duplicated to a computer using CapDVHS.exe. This offers another way to archive all D-VHS tapes with the DRM copy freely tag. Using a FireWire connection from cable boxes to computers, VLC can stream live, unencrypted content to a monitor or HDTV. VLC media player can display the playing video as the desktop wallpaper, like Windows DreamScene, by using DirectX (only available on Windows Operating Systems). VLC media player can do screencasts and record the desktop. On Microsoft Windows, VLC also supports the Direct Media Object (DMO) framework and can therefore make use of some third-party DLLs. On most platforms, VLC can tune in to and view DVB-C, DVB-T and DVB-S channels. On Mac OS X the separate EyeTV plugin is required, on Windows it requires the card’s BDA Drivers. VLC can be installed and run directly from a flash or other external drive. VLC can be extended through scripting. It uses the Lua scripting language. VLC can play videos in the AVCHD format, a highly compressed format used in recent HD camcorders.

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