A note for anybody installing VLC on Windows 98

June 3, 2006 at 4:20PM A note for anybody installing VLC on Windows 98

VLC is an excellent, resource frugal, open source, cross-platform media player. That’s a lot of adjectives. I can’t recommend it enough especially if you want a media player that plays just about everything and will work well even on older machines.

However, when installing it on my parents’ old Windows 98 machine last night, I ran into a problem. While it can work just fine on Windows 98, it requires a DLL, unicows.dll, that isn’t necessarily already on the machine and isn’t supplied with the installer. This is a support DLL for applications that need Unicode support on non-Unicode versions of Windows like Windows 98.

I looked around online for a copy, found one, checked it was safe and installed it. It works fine. I’ve written a small installer batch file and uploaded it and the DLL for anybody who might find it useful. You can download it here. Alternatively, download the The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems from Microsoft themselves.

Comments

1 On June 9, 2006 at 16:14, Jason wrote:

Thank you very much... this saved me the headache of finding it myself.

2 On June 18, 2006 at 13:03, Julio wrote:

Thanks dude!!!...you rule.

3 On June 18, 2006 at 13:34, roman wrote:

thanks a lot man!!!!!!

4 On June 19, 2006 at 19:45, Graeme wrote:

Thanks you saved me from a headache.

5 On June 25, 2006 at 0:08, Boxeschesser (Tom) wrote:

Thank you very much!

I needed it for running vlc on a Thinkpad 390 (2626) and it works! Thanks again.

6 On August 15, 2006 at 13:00, wasubire wrote:

thanks man this is like red wine on a sunday evening. I saved me alot of headache

7 On August 21, 2006 at 23:13, David wrote:

I didn’t think I’d get around this Win98 problem (on my kids’ computer) quickly...but you’ve done it! Thanks!

8 On September 7, 2006 at 18:10, Whisper wrote:

Just formated win 98 for a clean install and as we know the missing/needed issue pops up far too often. So it in fact could take days before you really do track down all these additional files. Thank you for making one less worry.