WMP 11 won't play .mp4 video file.

[Deabelos]

I recently upgraded Windows Media Player to 11 version. After the upgrade was installed, I installed WMEncoder 9 codec pack. I also installed GSPot to notice the audio and video codecs on my laptop. Windows XP control panel shows that 14 video codes are there on my computer. Also, GSpot shows 288 audio and video codecs but still WMP 11 will not recognize the mp4 file? Also, when I play .avi file then WMP 11 will play only audio and no video? Any ideas?

[HELLIAN]

Can you right click an .mp4 file and select Properties > Change Button and then select Windows Media player and click Ok and then apply and ok again. Check if that makes any difference. If not then you can try to uninstall your current codec packages and install the Vista Codec Package and see if that helps.

[JohnRolandElliott]

What do you need? It depends.

For times like these, in addition to GSpot, you might find MediaInfo useful.

Like a file with an extension of AVI, a file with an extension of MP4 typically contains two or more data streams - a video and an audio. Additionally, some containers have provisions for multiple audio streams and text streams, such as foreign language dubbing and subtitles. MKV is another common container, as is DVR-MS.

The video stream can be encoded any of several ways - DivX, XviD and AVC are common. Likewise, the audio might be AAC or MP3 or something else entirely.

So what you need in order to play an arbitrary MP4 or AVI depends on how the audio and video streams are encoded in addition to what kind of container they're packaged in. GSpot or MediaInfo can help you determine that. MediaInfo has buttons that purport to take you to download sites for the various compression schemes that it recognizes.

All that said, before all is said and done, you might need to install ffdshow, QuickTime (shudder), RealPlayer and some Matroska stuff before you're prepared to handle everything you might find.

Start with ffdshow and see if that gets you past your immediate

[ApPy10]

Have you tried to install QuickTime player and used it to play mp4 files:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

[anshusehgal]

I think that quicktime will only play the file if it can find the proper codec to do so. I am having many mp4 files that is not playable in quicktime. So better download VLC.