Raymond.CC Blog

Audio and video playback problems can often be caused by NOT having the correct codec installed on your computer, or even the wrong version installed… A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. The word codec may be a combination of any of the following:
1. Compressor-Decompressor
2. Coder-Decoder
3. Compression/Decompression algorithm

For example, a downloaded movie clip on the internet can be played. There is sound but no video. Or sometimes there is video but no sound. Now when asked the person what codec’s they have on their computer 99% of home users do NOT know… Finding this information can be quite difficult for an average home user.

Here I provide the manual(hard) and automatic(easy) way to determine what video and audio codec is installed.


The manual way of checking installed VIDEO and AUDIO Codecs In Windows.
1. Go to Control Panel.
2. Click on the Sounds and Audio Devices icon.
3. Click on the Hardware tab. Now you’ll see Audio Codecs and Video Codecs on the list.
4. To check installed Video codecs, select Video Codecs and click on Properties button.
5. Click on the Properties tab and you’ll see the whole list of Video Codecs installed.
(To check installed Audio Codecs, on step 4, select Audio Codecs and follow the rest of the steps)

The easier way is to use a small program called SHERLOCK – The Codec Detective. Run it and it’ll list all your Video codecs and Audio codecs on your computer.

SHERLOCK is able to check to see if any of the codec’s were “BROKEN” (will be highlighted in RED….), export the data to a text file for technical support, FAST to run on a PC and did NOT require installing and SMALL enough for download by modem!

This codec detection software definitely has more advantages than the manual way. It gives you the version number of the codec installed, description of the codec, location of the codec driver, last modified date and even the company name so you can search much easier on Google.

SHERLOCK – The Codec Detective is designed for Windows XP Home Edition & Windows XP Professional ONLY. Not sure if it will work on other version of Windows. If you didn’t know, one of the best codec pack out there is called K-Lite Codec Pack. Simply install the codec pack and you can forget about the problem of can’t view movies that’s downloaded from the Internet.

[ Download SHERLOCK - The Codec Detective ]