GSpot

When attempting to playing a movie file, such as an AVI, you may find that the audio and/or video doesn't play because of a missing codec. One solution is to use a audio/video player, such as VLC, which has built-in support for a wide variety of audio/video codecs. Or, if you prefer to stick with the media player you are accustomed to, such as Windows Media Player, then you can use a program, such as GSpot to identify the missing codec.

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VLC Media Player

VLC media player is a free cross-platform media player, which runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Syllable, and GNU/Linux systems. It also runs on BSD and Solaris systems. It is released under a GPL version 2 license.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc, as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream with extended features, such as video on demand, on the fly transcoding, etc., in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. It doesn't need any external codec or program to work.

VLC supports the following types of files and, when installed, will make itself the default program for opening these types of files, unless you specify otherwise.

VLC File Type Associations

Audio Files

.a52
.aac
.ac3
.dts
.flac
.mka
.mp1
.mp2
.mp3
.ogg
.spx
.wav
.wma

Video Files

.asf
.avi
.divx
.dv
.m1v
.m2v
.mkv
.mov
.mp4
.mpeg
.mpeg1
.mpeg2
.mpeg4
.mpg
.ps
.ts
.ogm
.vob
.wmv

Other

.asx
.bin
.cue
.m3u
.pls
.vlc

References:

1. The VideoLAN Web site
2. VLC ReadMe

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