Windows Media Player 10 Error 8004022A

I like DirectShow because of how flexible it is, but that flexibility comes with a lot of downsides. One downside about the way that DirectShow works is that the amount of information available for troubleshooting is slim to nil.

DirectShow is based off of what are called "pins." Let's say I want to play a video file. To me, it looks like I just double-click on the icon. To the computer, the file is a stream of data. That stream goes to what's called an AVI splitter, which takes the AVI file and turns it into two seperate streams: a video stream and an audio stream. The splitter directs the stream to the "pin" that is supposed to handle it.

For example, once I installed Windows Media Player 10, I started getting this error #8004022A all the time when trying to play .AVI files. I would get video, but no audio.

After a lot of research, I found that the biggest problem seems to be a small application named FFDSHOW. FFDSHOW is a DirectShow filter. A filter is essentially another type of pin. FFDSHOW is telling DirectShow that certain types of audio files should go to it first, and that it will forward the information to the proper pin.

However, WMP10 doesn't like to talk to FFDSHOW in some circumstances. To be dead honest with you, most of us don't even need FFDSHOW.

So, how do I get rid of FFDSHOW and this stupid error, you may ask? Easy.

• Open your Control Panel, and select Add/Remove Programs.
• Scroll down until you see ffdshow (remove only).
• Click on that item, then hit the Remove button when it comes up.
• Wait a few seconds for the uninstall to complete and follow the instructions on the screen.

Now, I don't know why FFDSHOW was messing up, but I do know that it was my problem, because once it went away, my problem went away.

Now if I could just figure out why the WMP10 UI becomes unresponsive for 20-30 seconds after a video file is launched, I'd be happy.