VLC is one of the popular media player and most of all it is free as well. If you download VLC media player then you don’t need to download extra codecs as these codecs are required in windows media player etc to play different formats.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac …) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

With VLC media player you dont need to have DVD player, DivX player etc. It will play you most of files and moreover you can play youtube downloaded videos as well with this player.

New Features in VLC 1.0.0:

• Free, Open Source and cross-platform
• Independent of systems codecs to support most video types
• Live recording
• Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
• Finer speed controls
• New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, …)
• New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, …) and major improvements in many formats…
• New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
• Video scaling in fullscreen
• RTSP Trickplay support
• Zipped file playback
• Customizable toolbars
• Easier encoding GUI in Qt interfaceBetter integration in Gtk environments
• MTP devices on linuxAirTunes streaming

Download the latest version for windows. It is also available for other operating systems.