One Media Player To Rule Them All
Just because the biggest and most recognized company makes a media player doesn't mean it's the best - or even any good for that matter. As with many things in life and on the internet, the biggest isn't always the best.
Specifically, Microsoft's windows media player is the most popular, but by far not the best. The biggest problem is a media player's ability to play all movie formats. Media Player is notorious for not supporting most movie formats. The problem lies in the video decoder portion of the media player. Movies are created (encoded) with specific formats such as AVI, MKV, MPG and so on. These formats require a decoder to be able to view them.Therein lies the problem. If a movie is encoded and you do not have the proper decoder, the movie will not play. You may get sound and no video etc. Windows media player will automatically attempt to download the proper "codec" but almost always fails to find the proper codec.
Competing movies players such as VideoLan Technologies (VLC Player) pretty much eliminate this problem. VLC media player support many video formats and plays just about every format without issue. VLC is also free to download and has the support of the community for updates, addons and more! Give it a try!
Download VLC