This is a quick guide on which steps you can take to fix most file or codecs errors that you might be receiving when trying to play a given movie/multimedia file.
Can’t even open the file/your computer does not recognise the file type?
If the file type is entirely unkown to your computer, chances are that you do not have an appropriate media player installed for the file type in question (or the file isn’t even a media file in the first place, or it has been given a wrong file extension).
Check out our file extensions page to find out which file extensions can be handled by which media players.
Find out which codecs the file requires/if it’s even valid!
In our tools downloads section you can download several different programs that can tell you some important information about the file. Try AVIcodec, GSpot, MediaInfo, MovieCodec Codec Tool or another of the available multimedia file inspection applications.
These applications will be able to tell you which video codecs (by FOURCC) and audio codecs (by audio tag) that you will need to get installed on your computer.
Which video codec? Which audio codec?
FOURCC (ie. DIVX) means Four Character Code and is basically just a key/code that uniquely identifies a particular video codec or type of video codec.
To find out which video codec is identified by a particular FOURCC, check out our FOURCC page.
Audio tag is basically a number, which may be in decimal (ie. 26447) or hexadecimal (0x674f).
To found out which audio codec is identified by a given audio tag, check out our audio tags page
What then?
Well to fix your codec error, simply download the codecs that you are missing. This may very well fix the playback issues that you were having with the file. To find the files to download just follow the links on the FOURCC or audio tags pages, or browse our video codecs/audio codecs download sections directly
Alternatively, to this entire process of locating individual codecs and installing them, you can use one of the “all-in-one” media players such as VLC or Media Player Classic, available from our media players download section.
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