ANY-maze Help > Cameras and Videos > Using video files with ANY-maze > Video codecs and why videos sometimes fail to play

Video codecs and why videos sometimes fail to play

Introduction

A video codec is piece of software that encodes and decodes video pictures (hence the name co-dec).

There are many different codecs available, for example MPG4 codecs, DivX codecs and WMV9 codecs. ANY-maze supports most codecs designed to work with Windows, with the exception of DMO codecs.

Why videos sometimes fail to play

When a video file is recorded, a codec is used to compress the video images. When you want to play the video, the same codec is required to decompress them. Unfortunately, Windows is only provided with a small selection of codecs as standard, and it's quite common to find that you can't play some videos because you don't have the required codec installed.

Installing additional codecs

There are a number of sites which provide free codec packs (which contain lots of different codecs) and installing one of these will usually resolve any issues.

You'll find links to recommended codec packs on our web-site. If this machine is not connected to the internet, then use another computer to search anymaze.com for the word 'codec'. Alternatively you can use Google to search for a codec pack - a couple of good choices are:

However, a word of warning; sometimes codec packs contain malware, so however you find a codec, you should subject any file you download to a thorough virus and malware scan before installing it.

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ANY-maze help topic T1335