I took some video clips on my old Samsung Digimax L60 camera. These show as AVI files. They play back fine using Windows Media Player on XP, but will not play in Windows Media Player on my friend's newer Dell Inspiron running Vista.
Bill Ashton
AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a container file format, and it can be used with a very wide range of video-coding/decoding software, or codecs for short. A video player will not play an .avi file if you don't have the right codec installed. Windows Media Player will usually download codecs automatically when you need them, but unfortunately this does not include independent codecs such as DivX and Xvid. You can find out which codec a movie needs, and whether you have it installed, by using a small utility, the GSpot Codec Information Appliance.
My quicker solution is to install the K-Lite Codec Pack 4.6.2. This includes most of the codecs and filters you are likely to need, useful tools such as GSpot, and Media Player Classic. This looks like an old copy of Windows Media Player but it has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's far less bloated than current versions of WMP and similar players. The minor drawback is that it's Windows only, but it works well in Vista. The cross-platform equivalent is VLC, which is also worth a look.
Codecs.com is a reliable source of codecs, which is important now that on-the-fly fake codec downloads are being used to distribute malware.
