AVI is a container. It’s like a wrapper, and inside you can have audio and video streams encoded in various codecs.
To play back an AVI encoded in a specific codec, you need to have the codec installed on your system.
There are tools to identify which codec(s) a media file uses.
gspot
avicodec
videoinspector
Once you find out what codec the file uses (for example video codecs are often identified by their fourcc (four character code)), you can search it on the web.
A clean installation of Windows will not support Quicktime (extension .mov) or mp4 files. The default player for those is
QuickTime Player.
As a note aside: you’ll often see a lot of people suggesting you get codec packs. Those are just compilations of codecs people put together. It’s really a toss-up whether they are stable with your system or if they’ll make it crash. I know it’s more tedious to use a diagnostic tool like gspot, and find the codecs on an as-needed basis and download them, but if something goes wrong, you know immediately what caused it and you can uninstall right away. You can’t do that cleanly with codec packs though. If you
must get a codec pack (for example because you don’t have much time), I’d suggest ffdshow-tryout, or an all-in-one player like
VideoLan. They support lots of formats and tend to be fairly stable. (You could for example use VideoLan as a replacement for WMP or QuickTime Player altogether).
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Video Codecs
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