No Audio When Streaming Video Through Windows Media Player

So for the longest time, I’ve been having problem with the audio when I streamed videos from particular sites. At first I thought it was just Firefox, but IE7 had had the same problem. CNN, MSNBC, and Yahoo! (just to name a few) all had problems with the audio. However, when playing videos off my gallery that used WMP (e.g. Detective Conan – Childhood Ending), WMP would play the audio fine, so I had initially eliminated WMP from the list of possible culprits for the problem. It was starting to get annoying as whenever I wanted to listen to a news report on CNN or MSNBC, I would have to find it on YouTube.

Anyway today, when I was trying to watch a trailer on Yahoo!: Facing Windows (Finestra di fronte, La), I was pissed that there was once again no sound coming from the video. The reason I was watching this trailer in the first place was that the foreign title La Finestra di fronte is actually the name of one of my favorite songs that I’ve listened to repeatedly and without the audio, I was definitely not enjoying it one bit. The song’s actually called Gocce di memoria by Giorgia, but the they also have a version with no lyrics and played by the National Symphonia Orchestra just titled Finestra di fronte (wasn’t able to find it on YouTube). If you’re interested, Amazon.com has the soundtrack available: La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) Soundtrack. Anyway, it turns out this was the movie the song was used in and actually the the soundtrack that I have.

(enlarge image)

So I started searching online to find out what could possibly be causing this problem. I quickly found this thread: Multimedia: No audio when streaming video

This was exactly the problem I was having and turns out the solution was as simple as changing a 1 to a 0.

Here are the instructions provided by xray88:

Make this registry change and I’m pretty sure it will fix your problem. If it doesn’t work, you can always change it back. It’ll work. 🙂

Go to the following registry folder:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\
    NodeCLSIDs\{95037DA1-6ED9-4B27-8CFF-9AD3DFB0B2F2}]

Double click on “Auto Insert” on the right side of the box.

Change the Value from “1” to “0” and click OK.

You should be set.

I didn’t even have to restart either of my browsers and audio immediately started playing. It turns out that when “Auto Insert” is enabled, WMP has problems streaming content with mono audio. I have no idea what the “Auto Insert” thing does, but disabling it definitely got my streaming audio to start working again.

According to cwwl, there is another way to fix this without messing with your registry (for those who are scared to screw something up):

First Thanks to xray88 for the registry change it works.

If you do not want to change the registry do this. The registry fix is the best solution but the fix below will work for the faint at heart.

1. Open Windows Media Player
2. Click on the “Now Playing Tab” and select “More Options”
3. Select the “DVD Tab”
4. Click on the “Advanced Box”
5. Under the Out Put Box “click the down arrow” beside (AS is (no change)
6. Select “1/0 mono”
7. Click “Apply & OK” and “OK” again
8. Exit Media Player

I tried following these instructions, but they started to differ after clicking the Advanced button. A ffdshow video decoder configuration appeared and it did have the Output tab, but nothing similar to any of the instructions that follow. I wonder if the bug is actually an ffdshow bug then.