My son has downloaded a variety of instructional FLV (Flash video) files that he wants to have available in Windows Media Player.  Since we just installed Windows 7, he was having trouble figuring out how to make it work.  He’d already installed the correct codec (ffdshow) so he was able to play the videos, but when he attempted to create a playlist of several of the videos, WMP wasn’t being cooperative.  Gone is the Monitor Folder interface from previous versions an in its place is a dependence on Libraries in Windows 7.  Sounds like a cool idea, but how do you get files to show up in WMP that show up in those folders?

It turns out Windows Media Player relies on some voodoo in the registry to get it to recognize FLV and MP4 files as video files.  Copy the following text to a .reg file (e.g. ShowFlvInWmp.reg) and open it from Windows Explorer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.flv]
"PerceivedType"="video"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.flv]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
"flv"="video"



Note: If you are having trouble with MP4 files, you can modify the above registry file to replace flv with mp4.

Once you’ve done this, you need to kick Windows Media Player to rescan the folders.

  1. Right-click on Videos and select Manage video library.
  2. Select the folder to remove and click the Remove button.
  3. Click the OK button.
  4. Right-click on Videos and select Manage video library.
  5. Click the Add button.
  6. Select the folder you want to add and click the Include folder button.
  7. Click the OK button.

Doing this will cause Windows Media Player to rescan folders.  Here’s another way to force a rescan:

  1. Press the Alt key to bring up the menu.
  2. Select Tools –> Apply Media Information Changes.
  3. You can close the dialog box by clicking the X in the upper right corner (don’t click the Cancel button) and it will run in the background.

Reflections

Windows Media Player hides a LOT of functionality from people who don’t fit into their “core usage scenarios.”  It’s quite frustrating, in fact, as this kind of thing is a lot more common than Microsoft allows for.  It’s issues like this that cause people to flee from WMP to other players.  I tend to prefer WMP, but when I have to work so hard to get it to do what I need, I’m much more willing to try other solutions.  Something for the folks at Microsoft to consider.

Caveat

ZachD from Microsoft makes the following statement:

Please don’t ever set UserApprovedOwning. That’s extremely reserved for my usage only.

It’s unsupported and deprecated. Please please do not set it. It’s not going to do anything “bad”, but :: that’s a user only setting that nobody but the WMP interfaces should be setting. Please.

WMP plays nice. =)

The problem is that if you don’t set that registry value, none of this works.  If someone can show me a way to get Windows Media Player to show FLV files without setting that registry value, I’d sure appreciate it.

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