Windows Media Player Problems

I have Windows Vista and I am having suddden problems with my media player when I take videos with my digital camera and put them on to my computer. I have never had problems until now. It saves them but it's saving them as a .MOV and should be saving them as a .AVI - I'm asuming this because all of my previous videos that I have saved are working and play just fine and the file name extension is .AVI but anything that I save now automatically saves with .MOV. I tried manually changing the extension to .AVI but I still get the same error message.

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."

My cousin was over the other day and we recorded a video with her digital camera and put it on the computer and it plays just fine - what the heck! and all of my older videos open and play also, just nothing that I record with my camera now, I don't get it. Is there some place that I can change the settings so that all of those type of files automatically save as .AVI, or is this not the problem. I am completely clueless, please help!

 

Is it possible the setting could be in your camera?

I don't know Vista and rarely use my digital camera so I'll leave it to others to offer suggestions as to where the choice of file type is decided when saving.

A quick fix for WMP not being able to play the .mov would be to get QuickTimeAlternative.

 

.mov is for quicktime, you can use that, although I prefer VLC media player on an XP system in place of quicktime.
http://majorgeeks.com/VLC_media_player_d4674.html
Sounds like you may have changed camera settings. Our Kodak saves as .mov, which will discourage me from purchasing another. If you google mov to avi there are free converters available, although I can not vouch for any of them. there is also this program, I have downloaded but never installed or used.
http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4987

 

So I downloaded the QuickTime player and what do ya know! Everything works. Sheesh! So because I have some files that open under Media Player and others that are QuickTime do I have to keep both? Is there a way to make all files open under the QuickTime? No biggie if there isn't an easy way, I'm just happy to be able to see all those videos I have of my 10 month old Thank you so much!

 

One more question, if anyone can help...I changed the settings somewhere so that everything would open using Media Player, thinking this would fix the original problem, it didn't but now that everything is working with QuickTime every time a want to view the pics or video it doesn't know how to open so I have to manually change each one I am viewing, where did I go to change this, I can't remember?? I need to get back to that place to adjust it to open through QuickTime.

 

This link should help you for Vista

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-us/help/6ef5399f-a0b6-4133-ac76-41cda36b1ca21033.mspx