Please do not encourage people to use an unlicensed beta binary. Since Microsoft has removed support for the Microsoft MPEG4 v3 implementation within AVI moving forward, each and every new install will continue to cause end users headaches because the content provider did not convert to use a different codec, and therefore content playback will again fail. The only good long term solution here is to stop using MPEG4 v3 within AVI. This is something content providers need to do, otherwise end users will continue to have problems that will only become more exacerbated over time. And I hate that. I think we all work towards people having a good user experience... 'helping' someone in this fashion is a net loss to the end user community, imho. So try to strike at the heart of the problem - advise the content provider to reencode - rather than trying to apply temporary band-aids that will stop working over time. ==== MPEG4 v2 within AVI is presents more of a playability issue than within ASF. Microsoft MPEG4 within AVI is only supported on Win32, whereas Microsoft MPEG4 within ASF is supported on Win32, the Mac, and Solaris right now, with other platforms being supported in the future. Microsoft MPEG4 within AVI is uniquely problematical because while there are N number of players that can play AVI, only DirectShow-aware players will be able to use the Windows Media Player-installed DirectShow codec filter. So if the user has installed QuickTime (non DirectShow-aware) within Netscape, for example, and then attempts to play the Microsoft MPEG4-compressed AVI you've supplied, it won't work for them since the QuickTime plug-in takes playback precendence over Windows Media Player. You have to force your end users to use Windows Media Player for AVI playback in order for this to work, which to me seems a bad position for a content provider to have to be in. (Windows Media Player is my player of choice, but tastes vary.) And you'd have to distribute unlicensed binaries.