Have you ever had a video not play on your computer?  Codecs are something that most people probably don’t think about when they play videos on their computer.  For the most part if you are encoding video and playing it back on the same computer you won’t run in to any problems.  But today I had an issue where I transferred a bunch of video files to a new laptop.  None of them played back in WMP, VLC or even in Adobe Premiere Pro.  The problem is that I had used a codec to encode them that wasn’t installed on the new laptop.

In trying to determine what codec was needed I came across a free utility program that did a nice job of telling me all the informaton about the video file I needed to know.  It’s called Gspot Codec Information Appliance and can be downloaded herehttp://www.headbands.com/gspot/.  It told me the type of codec that the video files were looking for and using google I was able to find and download the codec I needed.