Internet is absolutely full of multimedia content, but a lot of it is not always easy to view. You know the story: you download a file as normal, you click on it, and when you expect Windows Media Player to show the images and sound as normal, all you get is a message saying that the codecs are being downloaded, followed by nothing except a psychedelic pattern playing in the background.

The problem is the codecs: each video is encoded in a particular way, in accordance with certain standards. Un-encoded videos would be so large that they’d be extremely complicated to handle, and so particular methods to compress the audio and video as needed in each case were developed. DivX was one of the first, along with Apple Quicktime and MPEG2 for DVD. Now the most popular ones are H.264 for high-definition video, Windows Media Video and the new versions of DivX and Xvid. But there are many more, for sound as well as video, although for audio the most common codec is MP3.

Luckily, there are compilations of codecs out there waiting to be downloaded and installed that can solve these old problems, installing on your system everything you need to enjoy practically any video or audio file around. K-Lite is one of the most well-known and popular collections, with frequent updates that update your machine so that you can enjoy multimedia content without worrying about compatibility problems. It may seem strange that it installs an old version of Windows Media Player, but this is one of the most compatible players around at the moment, and any newer version you already have installed will not be affected.

More about K-Lite.

Tags: Audio, Design, Video //