Regarding Mplayer, I've played around with the windows version for quite a few months now and it can, but doesn't always need to, use external codecs. It uses the free FFmpeg internal codecs to decode WMV files of which there are 3 types WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3. WMV1 works fine apparently, but WMV2 has problems and WMV3 crashes. This is the default, as they want users to report bugs and get things fixed. To decode, say WMV2, more or less perfectly you need to get hold of the codec files - wmadmod.dll and wmvdmod.dll - and place these in the \mplayer\codecs directory (create if it doesn't exist) You then need to comment out the ffwmv2 and ffwmv3 entries in your codecs.conf file which you may (or may not) find in your \mplayer\mplayer directory, so that you force the program to use the dll's. An alternative method is to use MPUI (the best GUI frontend for windows), and find the 'Additional Mplayer Parameters' box (it's in Options > Options in my version) and stick the following in the box to force Mplayer to try using the Microsoft dll's first of all. -afm dmo -vfm dmo The 'dmo' above is the name of the 'codec family', other examples being 'dshow', 'realvid' etc. You can get codecs from Mplayer's site or get one of the K-lite packs and, instead of installing, unpack with Inno Setup Unpacker (innounp.sourceforge.net). To get a list of audio/video codecs supported by Mplayer, go to the command line and once inside the \mplayer directory type :- mplayer -ac help > acodecs.txt mplayer -vc help > vcodecs.txt This makes a couple of text files which can help you pick which codecs to use and tells you which family they belong to and whether they work, crash etc. Mplayer has an 'output' which can be read and tells you a load of stuff about what codecs it's using and what kind of video/audio file you're playing etc, which can be helpful. Xvid, Divx, mpeg and many others play back fine using Mplayers internal codecs, it's just a few that need adjustment. Hope this helps MC