More Information
With Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7, you already have a very powerful tool for playing, managing, synchronizing and copying of video and audio files. If you are using an earlier version of Windows such as Windows XP, we recommend that you install the current version of media player, to the benefit of all features and functionality.Download - Windows Media Player for Windows XP
Play videos with Windows Media Player
It is very easy to play a video file by using Windows Media Player. If you save a video file on your hard disk, double-click the file to launch. You can watch videos on the Internet (such as the library of ARD or ZDF) by using Windows Media Player, you might need a small browser add-on program for it. To do this, follow these steps: more in the following parts of this series.
1. Click Start.
Windows Media Player 12: Video codecs
To properly play video (and even music files), Windows Media Player required an appropriate codec. Codecs are small programs that encode digital signals in a file or data and decode. Only in this way, the player can interpret the streams as a music or film and play correctly. If a codec is missing in the system, the corresponding video file cannot be played. You will receive an error message.
Codec control
You can easily control what codecs are already installed and ensure that the media player when loads automatically new codecs from the Internet.
1. Click Start.
![press [CTRL] and [M] at the same time](/images/en-us/f0f14633-3bcb-91b2-ec5c-bc2e31e966fb?format=avif&w=800)
Codecs have automatically installed
You can configure the Windows Media Player so that it automatically downloads and installs updates and codec enhancements from the Internet when available. This makes more sense in most cases than manually in the Internet codec packs to search for. Some of the circulating on the Internet, free codec packs are not mature or with malicious software. In the worst cases, these programs break the functionality of Windows Media Player.
1. Start Windows Media Player as described above, and then click Tools on the menu bar.
