How to Play MP4 with Windows Media Player

Since movies and videos encoded in MP4 format look great, MP4 is becoming more and more popular for storing digital audio and digital video streams, especially those defined by MPEG. Various multimedia devices like iPhone, iPad, iPod, PSP, etc. well supports the MP4 format. And you may have got many MP4 files on your computer and want to play MP4 in Windows Media Player. However, you are only to find that MP4 files are not supported by Windows Media Player by default.

In order to make Windows Media Player play MP4 videos, you will need to install some MP4 codecs for Windows Media Player or simply convert MP4 to Windows Media Player highly compatible WMV or AVI videos. Keep on reading and choose the way you prefer to make MP4 playable in Windows Media Player.

Method 1. Convert MP4 to Windows Media Player friendly WMV or AVI videos

The easiest way to play MP4 in Windows Media Player is to convert MP4 to Windows Media Player WMV or AVI first and then play the WMV or AVI videos in Windows Media Player with ease. To do this, you can just get a video converter and do it as easy as ABC. To convert MP4, you can turn to Aimersoft Video Converter Ultimate, an easy-to-use converting program designed for providing the solution of converting videos between all the popular audio and video formats. Supported video formats include MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, FLV, ASF, AVCHD, MKV, etc.

Download MP4 to Windows Media Player Converter:

After downloading, follow the wizard to install and launch the program. The software interface is as below. What you need to do is to load the MP4 files you want to convert and then choose the output video format as WMV or AVI. If you like, you can edit the videos by cropping, splitting, trimming and appending special effects.

Download MP4 to Windows Media Player Converter:

Here is the video tutorial showing you how to convert MP4 for Windows Media Player:

Method 2. Install some MP4 codecs for Windows Media Player

In order to play MP4 in Windows Media Player, you must install some MP4 codecs first. Below are some popular Windows Media Player MP4 codecs.

1. MP4 Splitter

In order to play MP4 files, you must have MP4 Splitter installed. Not to be confused with MPEG-4 Video, the MP4 Bit stream format is a wrapper format (similar to AVI/OGM/Matroska). The format was licensed from Apple's QuickTime by the MPEG group as the official file format for MPEG-4 content. It should become more popular as commercial entities start shipping more MPEG-4 content.

2. Elecard MPEG-4 Codec Pack

This Codec Pack provides a wide range of MPEG-4 decoding/encoding solutions, which are offered as DirectShow Filters. Elecard MPEG-4 Codec Pack will enable you to encode and decode various video and audio stream types.