A less experienced user probably couldn’t tell you if they have a certain codec installed to be able to play a file.įinding this information can be quite difficult for an average user, but there are ways to get it. If for example, you download a video from the internet, your media player has to have access to the same decoder that it was encoded in. The term “codec” is made up of the words Coder- Decoder, and is simply a device or a piece of software that can encode or decode a piece of data, in our case audio or video data. In fact, a number of audio and video playback issues can often be caused by not having the correct codec installed on your computer, a problem with the installed codec, or even the wrong version installed.
Sometimes when you try to play a video file in a player like Windows Media Player, you might receive an error that the file cannot be played, or a codec is not installed on your system.