Play All Media Files

With so many file formats online for music, video, animation, and even text; being able to see all of this content becomes a chore of locating the proper codecs and programs to display the file in question with. To help you out, I have assembled a list of programs you should have if you want to be able to watch or listen to most of the content available online.

Real Player
Real player plays real media files and many others. Real media files are often presented with the .rm extension and can include streaming video and audio. Many online radio stations use the real media file format.

Windows Media Player
This is installed by default with Windows XP but you may not have it updated. Update Windows Media Player to watch .wma and .wmv among other formats.

DivX Player
Many large video files are compressed with DivX and they usually have the file extension of .avi leading to some confusion with the old school .avi that most media players can play by default.

QuickTime
Appleâ??s QuickTime is often used for displaying video and it is also used less often to play audio online. You can choose to install QuickTime without iTunes, the link to do so will be somewhat hidden but it is there.

Flash Player
Flash is one of the defacto standards for interactive web pages. Your web browser should ask you to download this once you encounter a website that utilizes Flash.