WarpMyMind

My fiancée has recently found a problem playing some files on her laptop. Specifically, files by hellion0 (including a few from the site, and some custom ones). I've tried it out with files by other authors (EMG, Cardigan, Sarnoga and my own), and had no problems whatsoever.

In order to stop the files being added to the auto playlists in WMP ("all music", "new tracks" etc.) we have renamed the files, giving them the extension ".hypnomp3" and associated this with VLC player.

This used to work fine, and still works for files by every other author we tried. She insists that she didn't change anything, and those files just stopped working. I do, however, note that her desktop has gained a new icon named "DivX Media Player", so I wonder if there could be a connection.

The files open in VLC, and appear to be playing (the media info, codec info, and stats including "bytes read", "packets read" etc. all seem to be reasonable, and the progress thing slides along), but all that comes out of the speakers is a silence of the right length for that file.

I've tried everything I can think of to make it play (re-downloading, renaming the files back, restart, reinstall VLC), but to no avail. Can anyone help me figure this one out?

Well, you could always uninstall the DiVx Player, but that may not be what you want to do. If so, get yourself a copy of lame and load the files with it and have it re-encrypt them. I expect that will solve the problem as I've seen some variations on mp3 files, especially if he did them as variable rate.

have you tried re-associating the files with VLC
or re-install VLC and re-associate the files.
what operating system do you run?