What Extensions Does Windows Media Player Play?
Windows Media Player is a media library application that plays back audio and video files on your computer. Windows Media Player supports several different file extensions, including audio, video and skins. Windows Media Player uses some file types as metadata to include additional information about the files you play back, including playlists, ratings, artist, title, length, genre and subtitles.
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Audio
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One of the most common audio formats that Windows Media Player supports is the MP3 coding, which use compressed CD-quality audio standards developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group. This group also develops MP2 and MPA files. Other audio extensions include Audio for Windows (WAV), CD audio tracks (CDA), Windows Media Audio (WMA), Audio Interchange File Format (AIF, AIFC, AIFF), musical instrument digital interface (MID, MIDI, RMI) and Sun Microsystems (AU, SND).
Video
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Audio Visual Interleave, or AVI, files are the most common audio and video data format and defined by Microsoft. The Moving Pictures Experts Group develops several video formats playable in Windows Media Player, including MPG, MPEG, M1V, MPE and MPV2 files. Windows Media Player also supports Windows Media Video (WMV, WM), Advanced Systems Format (ASF) and Indeo Video Technology (IVF) files. However, Indeo frequently updates its codec, which requires you to always have the most current Indeo package.
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Metadata
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Windows Media Players supports several types of metadata files, including M3U, which are playlists of MP3s with additional data. Advanced stream redirector (ASX) files are text files with information about a file stream, including how to present a playlist. Windows media audio redirector (WAX) and Windows media video redirector (WVX) files reference WMA and WMV files, respectively, while Windows media redirector (WMX) files may reference either WMA or WMV, or both. Windows Media Player playlist (WPL) files may create dynamic playlists, which is an advantage over the M3U and ASX extensions.
Skins
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You may import skins into Windows Media Player and change the player's appearance. Skins have the WMS extension and are XML documents with definitions for various parts of the skin, including art files, mapping images and hover images. All of these parts are compressed into compressed archives with a WMZ extension, which you import into the player. Windows Media Download (WMD) packages contain skins, playlists and content in one package, which you may import as a whole into Windows Media Player.
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