My 32-bit Video For Windows based app doesn't work under Win7/64 or Vista/64?

Question

I wrote a program that relies on Video For Windows. It worked fine under XP & Vista 32-bit OSes, but now I am trying to run it on the newer 64-bit OSes it isn't able to open any AVI files. The actual program starts up fine, the GUI appears, the File Open dialog works fine, but the VFW library is saying it cannot open some generic AVI files that use several different codecs.

Anybody know if VFW support has been dropped from the 64-bit OSes, or could it be something else?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Anybody know if VFW support has been dropped from the 64-bit OSes?

VFW works in 64 bit Windows just the same as it ever did on 32 bit Windows.

You probably don't have the codecs installed but that's just a guess because you didn't give any details of error messages.

Answer 2

VfW works in x64 machines, but only if your process is x86. An x64 process will only be able to open x64 codecs. x64 codecs do exist, but they are rare, and need to be installed.

If your process has to be x64, and you have to access x86 codecs, then the only way to do it is to have a multiprocess architecture, with a child process doing the file read and passing the data to the x64 parent via named pipes.