My wife’s computer acquired a virus, we don’t know how since she practices safety above all (but she gets Word files from customers, so who knows). Our guru brought it back with the OS, Win XP, reinstalled. But various components were missing and she asked me to reinstall them. First came Firefox. Next she asked to install a media player. So I found the Windows Media Player (which I use and find satisfactory) online and tried to install it. The first thing I had to do was go through a “validate your OS” procedure (it is called Windows Advantage, but it certainly is no advantage to me). This gave me a validation code, which I entered and the download process continued. To make a long story short, the installation ended in an error message, can’t install plug-in Mozilla, get the plug-installer. So I did that and ran it but it too ended in an error code and the notation that it could not copy a certain file. Repeat, to the same effect.
Anyway, please recommend me a media player that is not so finicky but you know is virus free.
I installed VLC. But when tried a video, it wanted me to install Adobe flash. I guess this is safe, but my wife is reluctant to do that and I don’t appear to have it on my computer although I do play videos. I can’t even figure out whether it is on my computer or not. It is not in the list of programs I see from the start window.
MS Media player is a poor excuse for a video viewer, and is always behind the tech curve. I highly recommend you install VLC. If it requires Flash, install that, too. Flash files are about as common in the Internet as PDF, and if you can’t read those, you are missing a lot of what the Internet has to offer.
The only thing I’ve ever used since I had XP is Media Player Classic (MPC) with the codec packs Matroska and/or Community Codec Project (CCP). I pretty much only use a PC with XP or Vista for playing music and videos, and I like the way they operate. No luck with VLC or WinAmp for me – I like the simpler interface. That’s just IMO. FWIW I use FooBar as a front-end for converting files (audio) – it’s a neat program, but I wouldn’t use it as my main go-to.
There is absolutely no reason to consider media player behind the times. It’s not what actually plays the files. It just uses codecs. In fact, what makes VLC special is that it doesn’t use codecs (at least, not by default).
And, yeah, I’m using codec in a nonstandard way. Those of you who noticed also know what I mean. The DirectX filters or whatever they are called that actually handled the decoding.