How do I play my H.264 and XviD movies? (Codec question)

Factual Questions
1

I stayed up til 5 last night trying to figure out how to watch these damn movies. I have two movies in the H.264 codec and two in XviD. WMP and Winamp just played the audio, of course, so I installed the following things to try to play these videos:

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The SVM thing was just a DLL that unfolded into my system32 folder. I had no idea what to do with it and it didn’t make WMP or Winamp do anything different so I deleted it.

The XviD codec pack seems to be a package of utilities that have nothing to do with decoding or playing XviD videos, despite one of them even being called “Decoding Preferences” or something. I can’t figure out what any of them do, frankly. That one sets preferences for some apparently imaginary program or some process I don’t know how to get to.

The Core Media Player, while solving some of my pet peeves with Winamp and WMP usability-wise, tosses up this error when I try to play my H.264 files:

And with XviD it flat out says it can’t handle it.

I’m at the end of my rope. HowTF do I play these files?

2

Have you tried the VLC Media Player? It handles a lot of formats and there are options for H.264 in the Preferences so I’m guessing it will work.

3

VLC Media Player is very good and I use it often, especially on broken AVI’s, but I’ve found the k lite codec pack to be indispensible. It has every codec you would ever need and you can use your favorite player as well. I even includes some useful tools such as enc-spot.

Get 'em both.

4

VLC plays the H.264 ones! Thanks to the both of ye, this is a HUGE help.

noodlehaus, how do I get my media players to use the codecs once I install them?

5

You don’t have to do anything exept maybe reboot. Your palyers will find them.

I use BSplayer mostly, along with Media Player Classic and VLC player as well as WinAVI and Main Concept Encoder and I never had to do anything.

6

Here’s a great freeware video conversion software to convert almost any video format:

7

Thanks again, everyone!