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I found it difficult to place this question in a suitable spot so I hope that this one will be ok.

My PC is a bit old. It has AMD 3ooo+ 1.8 GHz. 2 G ram. a K*Triton AGP8x motherboard and two hard drives with plenty of spare space. Op system is Win XP home.

I have downloaded a video from my rather old Panasonic digital video camera onto my PC. the original video is on a mini cassette tape (PAL). and was downloaded using a firewire connection and using Windows Movie maker. The transition of the pictures was fine but the sound is not. My voice on the tape is as perfect as I am likely to make it but the transferred sound is distorted so that my voice sounds as if I have swallowed a bit of Helium. All of my enquiries so far have drawn a blank. One person has suggested that maybe I need the correct CODEC. I have now found out what that is but have no idea if it is the problem and if so, where I get the correct one and when got, what to do with it.

Immediately after finding this problem with the sound on my video, I also noticed that I have the same affect showing on any utube video that I attempt to watch. I feel that this cannot be a coincidence. I also have become aware that utube and Adobe reader are somehow connected and that there is a similar problem with utube for a lot of folk.

I should add that all other uses of sound on my PC are perfectly ok. I can play DVDs or run AV's with sound and no problems.

I don't care too much about the utube problem but I do need to find a way of getting correct sound on my downloaded video's.

Can anyone offer help or some idea that may lead to a solution?

Thanks for reading this diatribe.

Hi michaelwis11

Since you have an old computer and operating system I think the problem might be with the drivers for your sound card. Since Windows Vista came along sound is mapped and handled in different ways. Check what soundcard is plugged in and search on-line for the latest driver software, starting with the manufacurers website. I imagine that the soundcard is quite old too and they stopped developing/supporting it some time ago. The CODEC approach might be what you need, but I found when I moved from Win98 to Vista half my old AVIs stopped playing and scouring the web for codecs and trying to configure them simply ate up hours of time to no avail. I did find that the free videoplayer VLC could render some of them properly, then I used it with a video screen capture program to save them in a different format. You might be able to use VLC Media Player to capture your Firewire correctly. As I say it's free from the web and is well trusted and regarded. Perhaps worth a try.

If that doesn't work you might be able to buy a later soundcard, but I suspect up-to-date ones won't run very well, if at all, under XP home and you probably won't even be able to find one that will plug into the motherboard and there is no guarantee it won't be exactly the same as what you have now.

The connection between Adobe and Youtube is the Adobe Flash program that is used to stream and render the video and audio. Again, this is fine tuned for speed and performance on more modern operating systems and hardware. DVDs and avi were developed when your computer was made, so they are off the same generation and were designed to work together. I'm afraid Flash Player was developed around a later generation of hardware and OS. For the firewire into Moviemaker problem Flash isn't involved, but both symptoms point me to suspect an obsolete soundcard and OS is the cause.

To my mind it's a real shame that so much computer hardware gets consigned to the scrapheap when it still performs perfectly to it's original spec.

I wish you luck, but I'm not hopeful of overcoming your problem without a newer computer. I hope the next person to reply to this thread knows more than I do and can suggest a better answer.

Wibby