Windows Vista codecs for Windows Media Player

Posted on July 26, 2008 at 5:24 am

I covered VLC media player in a previous post, and heralded it as a cure for all of your codec blues. Whilst it is certainly a great way to avoid coded problems, I have recently hit a situation that VLC just did not fit, let me explain.

My new apartment has a TV (I actually have not owned a TV in years, I don’t watch TV, although I do watch movies on my PC) and I had recently been giving a remote control for Windows Vista. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use my spare laptop as a media center, and plug it directly into the TV, allowing me to watch movies on the big screen.

Of course, this meant using Windows Media Center, and I was instantly back in codec hell, as most of the movies I have stored on my portable drive are encoded in weird and wonderful ways. So the search was on to find a cure for my problems, and eventually I found the Vista Codec Pack.

branded

I was somewhat dubious about the claims made on the website, that it would cure all of my codec problems, and windows media center, along with windows media player, would be able to play every single video file known to mankind. I really did not expect much as I downloaded the installer from the very amateur looking website, but I figured what the heck, anything is worth a try.

The first hint that everything was looking funky, was that files that previously had no thumbnail image, started to generate them, so I quickly fired up Windows Media Centre and viola! Every video file I own now plays perfectly.

choices

As you can see from the image above, you can fully configure each aspect of the included codecs, but in truth I have not needed to tweak anything. So I really do suggest everybody who owns Vista gives this a try, it really is one of the coolest solutions to a very annoying problem I have found in a long time.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Windows Vista codecs for Windows Media Player”

  1. delajoker said on : July 30th, 2008 at 3:58 am

    that’s a big help. thanks


  2. RestOFTheMovie said on : August 7th, 2008 at 3:10 am

    check this http://restofthemovie.com


  3. patricia said on : August 31st, 2008 at 7:25 am

    Please tell me how to connect my laptop to a dvd player so that I can copy a dvd onto my laptop to my hard drive so that I may watch dvd later.


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