WMP 11 will play .avi file audio but not video

I took two movies from my friend’s external hard drive. Both of these files are in AVI format and play fine on his PC. When I try playing them on my Windows XP SP2 based Windows Media player 11, one of the movies only gives Audio with black screen (no video) while other one is just not applying at all.

Somebody suggested me to convert those files into mpg from avi using FxMPEG writer but when I try doing that i get an error message saying that the file either has no video, or it does not have the correct codec, or the file is not supported.

Now I don’t have any idea what is wrong with my system. Do you guys have any knowledge about this?

Usually Windows Media Player is not capable for playing few file formats like AVI, FLV, etc. You need to install external codecs like DivX or K-Lite for the same.

So Google for the same, download any one of them and install. Once done, better restart your computer and movies should work fine.

Thanks a lot for your help Toby. It really worked but helped me partially. As I mentioned in my above post one video was not at all able to play where second was playing just Audio. After applying DivX codec, now am getting the Video as well along with the Audio but the first video is still not playing at all.

What went wrong?

I have faced numerous problem with Windows Media Player since I started using it. After getting frustrated, a guy on this forum provided me with the solution that worked for me fixing everything. It was to change our media player to VLC. You can download it from videolan.org. Its free and plays almost all types of audio and video.