Windows Universal Media Player

Windows Media Player is Microsoft's propriety music and video player software. Windows Media Player supports the following audio and video formats by default: .wav, .cda, .au, .snd, .aif, .aifc, .aiff, .mid, .midi, .rmi, .mp3, .mp2, .mpa, .avi, .wma, .asf, .mpe, .mpeg, .mpg, .m1v, .wmv, .wm, .avi, and .asf.

To support other popular formats such as vob, rm, aac, mp4, flac, ogg, divx, et.al., Windows Media Player needs codecs (coder and decoder). Manually finding and downloading these files can be a hectic process. Fortunately, Codecguide has compiled most of the codecs for us and one of the best compiled packs they have is the K-Lite Codec Pack which has about 95% codecs stripped-down and compressed into one tiny installer. The K-Lite Codec Pack has 5 Versions, namely, Basic, Standard, Full, Mega, and Corporate. They also have a codec pack for 64-bit systems.

You don't have to download separate player applications like Quicktime, or Real Media Player, etcetera, just to play a particular format. By installing the K-Lite Codec Pack, Windows Media Player becomes a power-packed Universal Media Player. Another benefit of having a codec package installed in your system is that you are assured a high (if not 100%)-rate of success when converting between formats. Now, all you need is DirectVobSub to load subtitle (.srt) files and you're all set.