Just a point to consider:
K-Lite offers QuickTime and RealPlayer alternates.
There has been some debate about copyright issues regarding these two.
RealPlayer has had some privacy issues in the past, so I don't use it.
And QuickTime is too bloated to suit my tastes. Also, there's something about running Apple products on my Windows system that rubs me the wrong way. I use the alternates provided by K-Lite.
Otherwise, there are many codec packages out there, and they are all fine to use.
You may even need some of them to run certain audio/video formats that Windows doesn't natively support.
However, if you don't need them, don't install them. I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple.
Personally, I use a portable version of Media Player Classic for everything. K-Lite provides this player for free. It comes in both 32 & 64 bit flavors.
I haven't gotten their codec packages for many moons now and MPC, by itself, plays everything just fine.
I prefer it to Windows Media Player; it just seems less 'cluttered' to me and certainly is a strong light-weight contender.
In fact, the only reason I have WMP installed on my computer at all is because the WEI won't run without it.
Ya know? Maybe I don't care that much for WEI after all... hmmm...
(I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium at the moment.)
