Reseting Codecs? and general joy with video

[Claymonkey]

I know this has been talked about before but the search on the forum brought up a lot of old software that doesn't help now.

Anyone have a program or a methodology to removing ALL codecs from a system and then putting it back to system defaults? Aside from xvid and possibly ffdshow (how do you make that annoying toolbar by the clock go away?) what codecs are people using?

I'm still annoyed that nero and powerdvd take over your system codecs to such a wide degree, and purposely choose a preference number outside of industry standards.

Finally anyone having any luck with video playback on their secondary monitors? For many video files and any DVD I get a black screen but still hear the audio. Nvidia changed their control panel extensively and overlay control is gone for the most part. I've found that turning off hardware acceleration can make problem videos and movies play on the secondary screen but that also breaks browser integration.

Speaking of browser integration what is with embedded WMP files sometimes being squished to being something like 16:9 when it's a 4:3 file?

[Nowhere]

If you're also asking for advice what to use for playback: (I'm actually not sure that you're asking )

- SMplayer (very nice player built on top of mplayer, independant of installed codecs)
- Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP , don't let the name turn you off, it's basically not a codec pack but polished build of ffdshow)

edit: I've just realised something. On CCCP page there's also "Insurgent" app, it detects other codecs installed in the system, I guess for dealing exactly with that sort of stuff that you want to do.

[Claymonkey]

the above might have been a little stream of conscious. Let me review.

I use WMP, VLC and PowerDVD generally for playback. (winamp and mediamonkey for music).

What I was looking for:
-Reseting all the codecs to the bare minimum and people's preferences for on top of that.
-tweaks/luck with video playback on secondary monitors
-anyone knowing how to fix that 'scrunching' problem in embedded WMP in Firefox/IE

The rest was just bitching. I'll have to look at SMplayer. I tried CCCP and I might give it another go. Generally not a fan of 'codec packs' and anything that has it's own control panel in the toolbar seems a little intrusive.. but if it does what i need it to do....