Windows Media Player

So, another oddity with Windows 7. Older versions of windows were a bit cranky about playing non-standard video files. However, it was fairly easy to work around the issue by installing ffdshow. Windows 7 (and WMP 12) are a bit more stubborn though.... they seem to think they'd prefer to use their codecs, and are very unwilling to accept anything else.

Enter a site called shark007.net, which provides a nice codec package for both 32 and 64 bit versions that mostly gets around it. Previews of "weird" types still won't show up in the file explorer, but at least you can just double-click a FLV movie, or an MKV, and watch it.