If you’re sticking with the older OS, then keep reading for more solutions. If you are running Vista or XP, it’s probably worth upgrading and not just because you get a slightly better version of Windows Media Player! Unfortunately, XP and Vista users will have to pay to upgrade their machines to Windows 10 or invest in a new machine. Version 12 can play the most formats including MP4, MOV, AAC, H.264 and M2TS. If are running Windows 7 or higher, then you are running the latest version, which is 12. If you are running Windows XP or Windows Vista, the latest version that will work on those operating systems is Windows Media Player 11. Newer Version of WMPĭepending on which version of Windows you are running, you might be able to fix your problem by simply upgrading Windows, which will give you a newer version of WMP.

You basically have four solutions to this problem: use a newer version of Windows Media Player, convert the video to another format like MP4, WMV, etc., install the necessary codecs on your system so that Windows Media Player can decompress the video stream or use a different media player like VLC, which already supports pretty much every codec out there.įor an in-depth understanding of all this, check out my guide to codecs, container formats and transcoding. If your AVI file contains a video stream that uses a more modern codec for compression, Windows Media Player may not be able to play it because it can’t decompress that particular codec. For example, the video stream could be compressed using the DivX, Xvid, H.264, VP9 or MPEG-4 codec. This is important because the format for the audio or video stream can be different inside the AVI container. This means that an AVI file contains audio and video data streams that can be played together in sync. The first thing you need to understand about AVI, aka Audio Video Interlaced, is that it is a very old container format created by Microsoft in 1992.

How to open avi files mac