avi black screen in windows media

Some avi's my son took with his fuji camera at vacation bible school will not play in windows media but the one taken with the vivitar did.

More precisely it appears to be playing but only a black screen appears in windows media player.

If I import them to windows movie maker they play in the movie maker window and I can covert them to wmv's so they now play in windows media.

Why? What codec am I missing? When they come off the camera they have the .avi extension. This is the same camera that the fireworks video was taken and as it came off the camera it did play in my media player so I am baffled. I have made no changes to any of my settings on the computer. Is it possible he set something wrong on the camera?

In Windows media player click tools>options>performance and lower the video acceleration to low or off. That usually takes care of the black screen during playback (and screengrabs too).

Tried it both on low and off and still only get the black screen. Any thing else to try?

Edit: I tried them in Vista and they play fine. Stange.....

GSpot should help you identify the correct codecs for the file.

I am having the same problem, if you find a solution, please post.

Try for the correct codec, Klite shoild take care of it. Standard should be enough.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/...codec_pack.htm

VLC or Media Player Classic.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/