Windows media player comes pre-installed unless you choose to download and install the N version of Windows, excluding media packages. Although even with a Windows media player installed, you might not be able to play all videos or music files. Some of them may require Codecs and give you out an error “A codec is required to play this file.” In order to play such videos, you need to download and install Codecs for Windows 10 for that specific video file type.
This article will explain what codecs are and how you can install codecs on your Windows 10 PC to play all the video or music files without any issues. Codecs are software that is used to compress and decompress media files like videos and music. Usually, the size of media files like Music will be bigger if it is RAW and unprocessed. So it is not possible to store or transfer them efficiently. For this specific purpose, Codecs were created to compress the media files and store them in containers like .mp4, .mp3 depending on the use case.
But the method used to compress this media will vary depending on the use case. When you compress a media file, you are definitely going to lose some quality of the media file. So depending on the requirement, one may use a method that results in better quality or better compression to save space.
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Why do you need to install Codecs in Windows 10
As a quick solution to most of the codec related problems, you can use the famous VLC media player. This single-player can play almost any media file you throw at it. It’s a complete media package. VLC also supports playing network streams and can be used to convert media files if any of your devices don’t support the codecs.
