Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 12:58
As technology evolves, new and updated standards are always emerging. One of these standards is the very common .mp3 file format standard. In 2001-2003 the mp4 was developed, for free usage, capable of containing and even streaming video, including Blu-ray. That was almost ten years ago, and occationally you'll stumble across an mp4 file, and will find to your dismay, that you won't be able to play it.
Microsoft Media Player, perhaps? Nope. Microsoft says that it doesn't support mp4 files, and refers you to third party programs for that, which in turn have been cancelled, and its drivers long since been removed from any filesharing site. There is a codec pack that includes it, but it's for WMP10, not WMP11, and if you DO happen to rollback to WMP10, and install the pack, it STILL won't work.
Winamp then? Good old trusty Winamp... ...plays only the sound and requires you to purchase Winamp Pro, because its primary selling point IS that you can play video mp4 files with Winamp Pro.
This means that you have to sigh, conclude that your popular and monopolistic players suck, throw them in the bin, go to Wikipedia and find the comparison page for video players.
Well of course you CAN'T REALLY ever delete the Windows Media Player from your computer, because Microsoft are monopolistic jerks. Instead you can only "roll back" to a previous version, but you'll find that rolling back from version 11 to version 10 is actually an improvement, fixing a couple of bugs in the program (like of instance being unable to remove plug-ins from it).
You should of course get a player that can not only play mp4 files, but as many formats as possible. QuickTime seem to be able to, to a certain degree, and it's also capapble of playing its own "Quicktime file format" (.qt files), but the Quicktime player itself, has earned a reputation as a bloated and insecure piece of software, so uninstall it - you won't need it anymore.
The media player jungle is quite large, and works in three stages: You first need to find the biggest "codec pack", capable of playing the most versatile number of file formats. There's a huge open source library pack of codecs which can play over a 100 file formats (including both mp4 and qt files) called FFmpeg.
What you have to do now is to find a media player that supports this pack. Of those, there are two great choices: FFplay and Mplayer.
However, these are just the underlying core of the players, and just downloading a core will have you play stuff through typing a command prompt instead of clicking a button. What you need is "a skin" (actually called a "front end", but you may also recognize it as a "GUI"). While the player cores does provide some front ends, these are surprisingly simple and ill-maintained. Fortunately, while the third party front end jungle is huge, it's not as dangerous: Just pick one that has been updated recently and worked on for awhile, and you're set to actually play media files with your media player.