Silent installation of codecs

Question

Background: I've been using the K-Lite codec pack for installing video and audio codecs required for playing media files in Windows via a silent/unattended installation which all works fine.

I am interested in figuring out how silent installs of K-Lite behave when previous installs of K-Lite already exist. Is it the case that silent/unattended installs of new versions can be reliably run on top of old ones? Is it possible to do a silent un-install as well?

Alternatively would some kind of command line tool exist (G-Spot?) which can detect the presence of codecs that have been already installed, or if there is a way of doing this programmatically in C++?

I would be keen to hear from those with experience of this.

Answer 1

OK. Have figured it out.

1. After having first created the silent install via

K-Lite-codec_pack-XYZ.exe -MakeUnattended

... and then running the batch file that gets created ... that's all there is to it!

Newer versions of K-Lite can be comfortably installed on top of old ones, though care should be taken in upgrading from very old K-Lite version. For more information about this point, see this relevant section of the FAQ.

It's also possible to run a silent un-install first. As well as removing K-Lite via the Control Panel, you can also run the uninstall executable, as described here.

Comprehensive blog posting with sample Visual Studio project can be found here:

http://www.technical-recipes.com/2014/creating-silent-installs-of-audio-and-video-codecs-using-k-lite/