Why Won’t My Video Play on My Computer?
This article applies to audio as well!
To get to straight to the answer- different kinds of videos have different formats. Sometimes you can tell the difference in format by the file type. The file type is the 3 characters that follow the “.” in the file name; eg mov in mymovie.mov . But other times the difference can be obscured- the movie is recorded at a different frame rate, different resolution, compression algorithm etc than is supported by the program that plays the video. All the differences are resolved by a file that isn’t the program itself, but something called a “codec.” In other words, any particular video player (or video maker, for that matter) requires two inputs: the video file (or the video stream) and a codec to translate the video stream for the movie program.
Rather than include a tutorial here, I’ll give a couple of links to tutorials. You can find others yourself by googling “audio video codec tutorial.” (From Kim Komando: If you have trouble playing a movie or audio, typically, you'll know if a missing codec is causing the hold up. An error message will report that a codec is missing. Hopefully, it will give you the name of the missing codec. If that's the case, you can try searching Google and manually install the codec.)
A word of warning from Kim Komando:
“A very popular codec package called K-Lite often appears as a virus. Remember, hackers are aware of what problems you're likely to encounter on your PC. So there's a lot of malicious content out there disguised as codecs. So, is not exactly the safest method. As is the case with K-Lite, criminals often repackage codecs with malware .”
This warning applies to clicking on the results of the google search. Make sure your browser is using some kind of security mechanism to prescreen results, such as McAfee's SiteAdvisor.
Links:
A more technical tutorial on Windows Media codecs.
Wiki article on Codecs
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