I’ve received a couple of emails lately from people having problems playing High Definition WMVs on their Windows Media Players. This is in addition to the usual “I’m on a Mac and can’t play WMVs – help!” emails I get every week.

I made a FAQ page that should clear up virtually 99% of all issues. Regardless if you’re an Aziani member or not you should check it out if you experience problems with videos.

In a nutshell, for some reason almost all problems recently are because of a corrupted Windows Media Player file. To find out if your WMP is screwed up download the free VLC Media Player and play your movie files. If it works on the VLC player your Windows Media Player is corrupted. If so you simply uninstall Windows Media Player and download and re-install a fresh copy on your system. You can find the latest version of the Windows Media Player here.

Don’t ask me why. My suspicion is that one of the recent Microsoft updates caused many Windows Media Players to get corrupted. Or it could just be coincidence that many users all of a sudden experience problems with their Windows Media Player. I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, I rarely ever get emails about problems with our videos and virtually all of the emails from the past few weeks dealt with broken Windows Media Players.  All members followed my steps on the video trouble shooting page and are now able to play all of our videos perfectly.

By the way, the other emails not dealing with Windows Media Player problems were from Mac users. The question/problem is always the same and the solution here was simple: you must have the latest version of Flip4Mac to play WMV movies on your Apple box.

Detailed note: only the most recent Flip4Mac software can play WMVs that were encoded with the Microsoft Windows Media 9 Advanced Profile codec. There’s not a lot of them out there yet but the number is growing so you’ll need to get your new Flip4Mac soon.

All trademarks and logos are property of their respective owners. I’m not affiliated with Microsoft, Apple, the makers of the VLC player, or Telestream (Flip4Mac).