On Start, see Company video but no game screen

[SerAris]

I'm a long-time JA/BE5/7.62 w/Blue Sun Mods nut. After waiting until they got some of the 1st round bugs out, I just now d/l the BiA Demo from Steam. When I start the game, I see the company graphics but then get a black screen with a mouse hour glass symbol around the outside of the screen and a mouse arrow cursor in a middle "window". So there's something there but it's also black and pixel clicking does nothing. So I'm in the dark here. (That works on so many levels!) )

When I get out of the "black hole" (screen) with task Mgr, I see that an MS error report has been generated and the "more info" link tells me that there's fddshow.exe issue. There's a link to fddshow & I d/l & save the latest version of fddshow, run it, and it sez my "file" is corrupted, so nothing happens.

I have a 3-year old quad 2.66mhz with 4gigs RAM and a GE Force 9600 card. I run all the Half-Life, Modern Warfare, Fallout 3 & New Vegas games without any problems.

Any suggestions? TIA.
Oops. This post is in JA general, not the sub forum JABiA. <---Tho't I there. Sorry.

[Pheace]

Sounds like there might be a problem playing the video's, despite seeing the first one.

You can go to steam/steamapps/common/jabia/bin_win32/videos folder and move these video's out of it temporarily.

1) coreplay_intro.wmv
2) kalypso_intro.wmv
3) amd.wmv
4) bitcomposer_intro.wmv
5) story_intro.wmv

I think that basically takes out all the video's you get at startup which should get you straight to the main screen. (a new patch would automatically redownload these if not found though)

That would just be a temporary solution though of course (you don't see another video till you finish the game I think), although I do think it should work.

You could try playing the video's with something like GOMplayer or any other player that looks up missing drivers, or perhaps install the Community Codec Pack. (not sure if it's a driver problem though but worth a shot right

[SerAris]

Bingo! removing the .wmv files you suggested got me to the main menu & the tutorial. Thanks!

Add'l Info (that might be useful): I tried opening all the .wmv files in the video folder itself. My default Win Media Player (classic) is 6.4.09.1130 and it gave me this msg, "Unable to download an appropriate decompressor." The video would work but the sound wouldn't. Maybe I need to update my Kodec pack?

So I selected my Microsquish media player ("modern", I guess...I don't like it) & I got video & sound! Aha! So I selected this as the default, tried to run the demo from Steam, but got the same black screen as before.

Thanks again for your suggestion. OneMug