Back in the days before Windows had UAC and 64 bits it was possible to distribute simple software, such as the lossless video codec Huffyuv without an installer. All you needed was the dll and an .inf file. To install it you would simply right click on the .inf file and click install, and windows would take care of copying the dll to the system folder, registering it and creating a few registry keys for you. Sadly those days are gone. If you download the Huffyuv codec today for your 64 bit version of Windows, extract the files and try that method of install, you won't see any error messages, but that codec will not appear in your list either.
To install it, you will need to open a command prompt and be logged in with a user account that has administrative privileges.
- Go to the Start menu/button > All Programs > Accessories and right click on Command Prompt then Left Click on "Run as Administrator".
- A little black DOS window should appear that will say "Administrator Command Prompt" at the top.
- In this example we are assuming that your copy of Windows was installed to the standard directory (C:\Windows), and that you extracted the huffyuv files to a folder on your c drive called "downloads". navigate to the SysWOW64 folder by typing: cd c:\windows\syswow64 and then press enter.
- Again, in the DOS box, type rundll32.exe setupapi.dll,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 0 c:\downloads\huffyuv.inf and press enter. Pay close attention to the spacing (or lack thereof). And that's a "zero" in the last half of the command, not the letter "O". There's no space around that comma. What you type has to match perfectly.
- If there are no error messages, then it has installed correctly.
