Windows Media Player is a terrific piece of software for playing back your favorite movies and music, but you may have found that sometimes double clicking on your favorite files doesn’t do much in terms of playback. If you’re wondering why that is, the answer may very well be that you’re missing some codecs.
A “codec” or a coder-decoder is a program that can encode and decode a digital data stream (as a quick search on Google will tell you). Now, a codec is an essential piece of any computer’s arsenal. When you use WMP to play the file in question, it is capable of searching the codec databanks in the system and then using the correct one to playback the media in question.
The most interesting part is that if you’re running Windows 7, you can stop reading this article – Microsoft has finally owned up to the fact that it’s ridiculous that an OS wouldn’t come pre-installed with the ability to playback media files of any kind, when it’s something that Apple has been doing for years now. With the pre-installed codec, you can playback anything from *.avi files to *.mp4 files natively in Windows Media Player.
The Internet, in a community effort, has come up with a unified solution for playing back video and audio in the form of a unified codec. Rather than having you install several different codecs like you would have to in the old days, this new codec combines all the best codecs in order to give you an all-in-one solution.
CCCP – Combined Community Codec Pack
http://www.cccp-project.net/
If you’re having trouble playing a specific file, downloading and installing this codec will resolve any and all issues - furthermore, there are other alternatives if it doesn’t work.
VLC – Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Suppose you STILL can’t play something after installing the CCCP. Well, that’s what VLC was made for. VLC Media player is an all-purpose, self-contained media player that contains EVERY codec imaginable. If you need to play an obscure or even outdated format of video, VLC is the program you’ll want to use. Everything from flash video to DVD can be played back using VLC.
Having both these programs will ensure that playback isn’t a variable, but rather is a certainty. As you use VLC and the codec pack, you may notice some slight slowdown if you don’t have enough RAM to run both programs, however, something like that will be rare even in the cheapest and lowest-end notebooks and PCs these days.
