Ableton Tutorial: Video Support Issues Solved for Windows 64

This is how to get videos to work in Ableton Live if you are using a 64 bit Windows Operating System!

I went to try my hand a some robot sound effects the other day. I wanted to see if I could make it sound like Transformers were transforming and wanted to do it with a short clip of one of the Michael Bay movies. There was a problem though. Ableton Live wasn't allowing me to import the video clips even though they were .mov.

I kept getting the same error, which you are probably seeing if you are reading this post.

ERROR MESSAGE: "The file ... could not be read. It may be corrupt or not licensed"

Turns out that error can be a bit misleading. What you need to do is a couple extra things if you are running Live on a 64bit Windows setup.

Ableton Live Video Formats

Live can import movies in Apple QuickTime format (.mov) to be used as video clips. Movie files appear in Live’s browser and can be imported by dragging them into the Live Set.

Note that Live will only display video for video clips residing in the Arrangement View. Movie files that are loaded into the Session View are treated as audio clips.

First a bit about video files as described by Ableton Staff

Video files

A digital video file (e.g. .mov, .mp4 or .avi) is basically a container that encapsulates one or more video and audio streams. Each of these streams again is encoded using an industry standard codec (e.g. mp3 or aac for audio, H.264/AVC or MPEG-2 for video).

To be able to play back such a video file on a computer, both a suitable demuxer for reading the container file and a matching decoder for each audio and video stream must be installed.

The most frequently used codec with acceptable performance and good quality is H.264 (also called AVC). As container file format, the best choice is .mov (Quicktime) or .mp4.

Recommended codecs

The 64-bit version of Live can use any DirectShow compatible demuxers and decoders that are available on the computer, but on a fresh Windows system, only a limited number of video codecs is installed by default. That's why you might need to install additional codecs.

In practice, some decoders are more suitable than others. Live is tested with the following two solutions that you can install on your machine to enable proper video support with the 64-bit version of Live.

DOWNLOAD THESE

Recommended by Ableton - a free solution, with good performance and a wide range of supported codecs and file formats (please install both components):

Demuxer: Haali Media Splitter (also known as MatroskaSplitter, download directly)
Codec: ffdshow 1.3.4531 (H.264, DV)
After you have downloaded them install them. That should be it.

Watch the Video Explanation

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Joshua Casper Online:

[ahegaosound]

2020 this solution still worked! THANK YOU dude!

[mikolajkurpios]

I was struggling with this crap for the past 6 years. One video and it instantly worked. I should definitely look for help on youtube more often. Thank you!!!

[energyofaquarius]

Thankyou for sharing! Mine still dint work but i used this tip and now its all G.

2. Switch from dedicated to integrated graphics

Please make sure that your graphic drivers are updated. If the problem persists, it might be worth trying to switch from the dedicated graphics card (e.g. NVIDIA) to the integrated card. This can be done via the NVIDIA control panel:
If this doesn't help, right-click on the Ableton icon and select the integrated card.

[kirkcoburn]

This worked Perfectly. Thank you very much. Its crazy how this problem still occurs years later.

[Magnetcross]

You're an absolute genius, thanks so much for the help, from a comment atm in 2021, no this isn't a bot and I can gurrentee to whoever in future is watching and reading the comments down below here, this worked for me with just the demuxer, but if that doesn't work, try the other one. Thanks so much Josh, its a pain that Ableton doesn't tell us about this too. And my issue was just dragging a mp4 video clip into a audio file with the same error in the bottom. But now it works

[Nastuslayer]

For those that are wondering, used this method right now and it worked. Thanks for the vídeo dude, really saved me

[CDU]

Thank you very much for the tutorial and the download links. It works perfect :)

[vailtutoringanimation]

THANK YOU SO MUCH. As someone whos entire career is build off YouTube tutorials, this was a fix to remember

[camilosolorzano]

Thank you! They worked. The only thing is idk if I just made Live to crash trying to re-escalate the video preview by right-clicking on it and messing up with the timeline, but it worked man, a huge step. Got a Film Scoring course this semester and this thing is crucial, I didn't want to download another DAW. Thanks a lot!!

[Cheeseparadox]

Just wanted to share, I have live 11 and I was actually getting a different error shown in the video window; "Could not decode file", and installing these two codecs fixed it. Thank you!

[sterlingsherman]

Ableton Live Suite 10 and all I needed was the first of the downloads on your blog. Worked like a charm!

[johndoe]

i didnt expect it to be that easy but it really was. thanks!

[laurentsauvagnac]

wow you are just saving our workflow thank you so much for the time and passion you're putting in what you're doing !!

[emreuludogann]

guys, those who cannot export; please try to match the buffer size exactly the same. for me, I export my audios in 32 bit. but for this situation I made 16 bit to 16 bit with NO ANALYSIS FILE.
have a nice production.

[andrewdaniels]

Cheers dude! I also found I had issues with video codecs and that some files were encoded specifically for QuickTime. After installing these I had to then convert the video to a Windows friendly codec. HandBrake is the converter that worked for me.

[sandanford]

Massive thank you on this tutorial. worked even in Ableton live 11 on a PC in 2021

[jessecole]

beautiful. thank you so much! all i need was Haali... for now. But it worked immediate when i downloaded, nothing needed to be done after installing and downloading. No files needed to be moved, just worked right away. Thank you so much

[vxbrance]

Still works and I'm using Live 11
Literally saved my life with this, I was trying to figure this out over a course of a year every once in a while and couldn't find a solution. Thank you.

[ELITECULTURE]

wow its rare that a video actually helps fix a problem. thanks a lot dude.

[jacobemms]

THIS IS LEGIT I THINK THE FIRST TIME I HAVE EVER DOWNLOADED SOMETHING OFF OF ONE OF THESE VIDEOS AND ITS ACTUALLY WORKED INSTANTLY THANKS HEAPS