It is strongly advised to avoid ASF where Should also be mentioned that Microsoft claims a patent on the ASFįormat, and may sue or threaten users who create ASF files with

mpeg4, Only if you have some MPEG-4 codec like ffdshow or Xvid.

The following list of video codecs should work on most Windows

They say: Which codecs are supported by Windows? avi files include the following codecs įfmpeg's FAQ is a bit more specific. Video codecs that are frequently used in. avi file and played in Windows Media Player, if the appropriate codecs are installed on the computer. For everything else, well, here's what Microsoft says:Īudio content or video content that is compressed with a wide variety of codecs can be stored in an. If you want to be on the safe side, you should probably convert into Windows Media Video (wmv). Installing additional multimedia codecs is something you should probably do on every fresh Windows machine though.Īccording to the Information about the Multimedia file types that Windows Media Player supports, there are some formats natively supported, but they aren't too specific about that. However, you can't assume that every PC has those installed, and you might want to ship your videos with a media player like VLC, which provides its own codecs and does not depend on Windows In fact, Windows versions up until 7 ship with almost no additional codecs at all, requiring the user to install a codec pack like K-Lite or CCCP. This is what you eventually have to do since Windows does not ship with every possible codec. You may need to install a DirectShow decoder for this video format in order to play this file. So a video generated by ffmpeg must not necessarily play in Windows Media Player. This is because ffmpeg uses its own libavcodec and libavformat libraries to encode and decode.

You can't, since ffmpeg on its own does not know which codecs are installed on your system and accessible for Windows Media Player.

Ffmpeg vcodec