Software Tricks, Tips and Hacking

Explorer can Show previews of .flv / .mp4 / .mov type video files

Nowadays the word Portability has came up with a new definition as we have portable software, portable devices and many more machinery with in the category portable…. but have you ever thought that this can be applied to files types also we have on our PC. No i am not talking about making them compact using winzip or winrar but the original content we can view or use.

Let me describe if we can remember the old days when for video files, the only supported files types were avi or wmv types which at that time were very large. But now do a comparison with video files available today (with a lot of codecs to do so) with MPG, FLV, MP4, DAT or any other video types. With the evaluation of FLV or MP4 the files has become comparably very low but this is where the problem begins. This is the reason that why the native support to these files with in explorer is missing. As we can’t view them as thumbnail as we can do with MPG files.. so now what, isn’t there any solution available.. of course yes! follow the below steps and with in moment you can get the previews of those files:

Open Note pad and paste the following lines there

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.flv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”

and save it with extension reg over the desktop or any other location suitable to you… now double click over the saved file …that’s it now enjoy viewing.

Tip: If you have any other file type for which you want to have preview then replace the word marked in red with the extension of missing thumbnail of video file and follow the above method….

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”

If anyway you are facing problems modifying the registry than you can download the registry setting from the download link given below. After download extract the zip file and double click on mp4-flv-mov-avi-preview.reg file to add settings required.

Download Registry Settings for FLV-MP4-MOV-AVI preview in explorer (less then 1 kb in size)

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