Having Trouble Playing a Media File?

If you play a lot of audio or video files in your Windows Media Player (or RealPlayer or any other media player), it's probably happened to you. You open a sound or video file to play it, and at best, it gives you a message saying that the file type is unsupported. At worst it just sits there and does nothing.

There's a good likelihood that your system doesn't support the particular codec the file uses. A utility called GSpot can quickly and pretty effortlessly diagnose the situation.

"Codec" is short for "compression/decompression," and it's simply a way of encoding multimedia files (audio and video) so that they're smaller (and sometimes encrypted), and then expanded and decrypted as they're played. Codecs are always being improved and new ones introduced. Systems don't always keep up with the newest additions.

Just yesterday I recorded a TV program to test the new Archos 604's PVR capabilities. The TV show's playback was just fine on the Archos player, but when I transferred it to my PC only the audio—no video—played. (Sigh.)

It turns out that the transfer was done in AVI, a common video format. But what I'd forgotten (or never knew?) was that AVI is just a container for video files and the contents inside the container can have many different variations.

Mine happened to be the DivX variation, a popular codec for compressing video. I found this out when I downloaded GSpot. (Yes, it's a bizarre name for a software utility and I can't vouch for what will happen should you decide to do a search for it!)

GSpot looks a bit intimidating because it gives serious videophiles a lot of information, but basically it tells you what you have and what you're missing in the codec world. It unzips in its own directory; you don't even need to install it. Just open it and use it to open your file.

Word of advice: All GSpot does is look for the codecs. It does not provide them. If, for example, it tells you, as it told me, that DivX was missing, you would head to a number of places that offer it for a download. I went straight to the source at DivX.com.

Experts suggest that you NEVER download a codec bundle that promises bunch of video codecs in one package. They say many of these are spyware-type packages and that others are just out of date. Download the one codec you're missing from the most authoritative source and you'll be fine.

Digital media evangelist Marc Liron offers links to safe places to download codecs from his web site.