Unable to play .MOV files

Report · Mar 11, 2020

All of a sudden, neither After Effects or Adobe Media Encoder, will play / encode a .MOV file without crashing the app. The .MOV files will play fine in WMP or VLC.

Wasted time with support chat to just have them say use handbrake instead. Thanks but I pay for Adobe products and they should work. That's not a acceptible answer to me.

Anyone else run into this? The chat support said it's becuase they're "variable frame rate" files and Adobe doesn't support that. My files are standard 29.97 files.

Report · Mar 11, 2020

You have not provided any system info nor any details about the CoDecs used, encoding settings in AE and AME and so on. This isn't really useful. However, since you mentioned WMP, it stands to reason that you introduced one of those cursed "CoDec packs" to your system and it made a mess of things...

Mylenium

Report · Mar 12, 2020

Thanks captain helpful.

I was asking if anyone experienced this same issue. The little info I could find spanned several years of posts and wildly different machine setups and OS versions. Setup didn't seem to matter at all so it doesn't seem relevant to the issue. But since you asked.

Windows 10, latest build. Intel i7-6700HQ, 16 gig RAM, NVIDIA GTX 1070. Alienware laptop, nothing crazy.

Never installed a codec pack. Fresh install of Adobe Creative cloud on this machine. Only other video app installed is Handbrake which Adobe told me to do.

At first Handbrake seemed to fix the problem, but now it's not. The video files work for a little then AE locks up. Oddly enough it seems to lock up after building the timeline preview files. Before it does that it seems to work fine.

Report · Mar 19, 2020

So it turns out the issue has nothing to do with the file formats at all. It's a driver issue with the built in Intel display adapter.

At first it seems like an easy fix, Adobe give you a link to the driver, you install it, then AE is happy. Problem is it's a 2 year old driver, and windows update changes it every update. Adobe wants you to use version 28 something, the current version is 48 something.

Pretty lame Adobe forces you into an out of date driver from 2018 to make their 2020 product work. Really frustrating at this point, I can only work until Windows update does anything, then I have to roll back the driver again.