Devil Disguised

"I was a bit disappointed to find out XP could recognize and autoplay DVDs but included no support for its little brother the VCD. My disappointment was however short lived, when I stumbled upon a Registry key I'd never seen before in Win9x. I wrote this document to show how I taught XP to recognize and automatically play a VCD or SVCD when it is inserted into the CD/DVD drive. For those who are unfamiliar with VCDs, it's basically a CD that contains movie files. The VCD (Video CD) format is comparable to the VHS standard in quality and uses MPEG1 standard. The SVCD (Super Video CD) is closer to DVD quality and uses MPEG2 standard. A full length movie generally occupies 2 to 3 CDs in VCD format or 3 to 4 in SVCD format. From the number of disk switching you can see why Autoplay recognition is a plus. The Registry key in question is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\ContentTypeSn iffers\VideoFilesContentSniffer and the specific Value name we'll be modifying within this key is "RelPattern" which is REG_MULTI_SZ (Multiple String). This Value type is properly recognized only by Regedt32.exe, NOT by Regedit.exe, therefore Regedt32 will be used in this case. Note that there are quite a few zero terminated strings already in this structure, and when we add our strings we must take care to preserve those already there. The Edit box pops up with all elements in there selected, so it's easy to type a single key and wipe out everything already present. Make sure to click once in the box or use a cursor key so the data gets deselected first. Then we can add these 4 strings after the last one in the structure: MPEGAV\AVSEQ01.DAT MPEG2\AVSEQ01.DAT MPEGAV\AVSEQ01.MPG MPEG2\AVSEQ01.MPG Click OK and exit Regedt32. All that's left is the association with the executable you want to use to play video files, such as WMP8 or PowerDVD. You could simply just leave it in prompt mode, so it asks what you want to use to play every time a file with this extension is opened. The VCD/SVCD standard is implemented loosely, but those 4 lines comprise the majority of disks I've seen. As an aside, I'm of the opinion that this key and its siblings are responsible for that annoying bug in XP where you're sometimes unable to delete media files. They are currently being sniffed, so you get the "in use" error. Another possibility is they are being indexed with that Fastfind reincarnation called Indexing Service. A quick fix I've found for that is to open a command prompt to the folder you want to delete the file from, then open Task Manager and End Task on Explorer.exe and/or Cidaemon.exe. Then delete from the prompt. Afterwards you can restart the shell from the Task Manager using the New Task button."

Varun

hmm useful