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In windows XP, I love the way of having previews of the image or video files being explored in windows explorer. But for quite some days, for some unknown reasons, the previews of almost every video formats was missing {whichever be it was *.avi,*.mpg, *.mpeg, *.dat, *.mp4 or any other} and of-course with a lot of searches and research finally i was able to have them all. If you are also facing the situation like me then you can also follow the procedures mentioned ahead:

Let me tell you for your information that preview of video files in windows explorer is related to a linked .dll file called “shmedia.dll” with in registry and you should make sure of that this file exist in your windows/system32 folder if yes then copy “regsvr32 shmedia.dll” without quotes and paste in the run window (you can open it by pressing “Windows key + r” using keyboard) if know click here to download the file and then copy it in windows system folder and repeat the run process as mentioned earlier. Hopefully after this step previews of *.avi files extension will be shown with in windows explorer. For some other files you have to change some registry settings as explained below.

First of all you should note that with in the registry there is a different category for every file extension and for each extension you have to manually insert the registry tweaks. Let me suppose you need to have a preview of *.mpg files for this purpose open notepad and note-down the following lines

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpg\shellex]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpg\shellex\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@=”{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}”
and save this file with .reg extension. (Here make sure that you have the access to change a file extension unless you cannot save this file in the desired extension and this will be saved as a .txt ‘a default extension for notepad‘. If the save goes successfully you can see the icon of the saved file as a pattern box  like  instead of  ….

Now double click on the file and it will prompt with a massage asking to install the settings with in the registry select Yes and you are done. Now you can see the previews of mpg files with in explorer. With the same process you can have previews of any file as mentioned above in the starting in explorer, the only thing you have to do is change with the desired extension. For Example in the above trick change .mpg with a .mp4 and save the file and once installed in the registry the previews of .mp4 files will be shown in the preview. If you need the above settings in the .reg format click here….. you can later edit this file with in notepad…..