My niece sent me a short movie from her phone where she’s singing a song. But I can’t view it, Windows complains it doesn’t know how to place a .MOV file. Help!
There are a remarkable number of different video formats, known as codecs, and while you’d like to think that all the big companies worked together to ensure video was cross-platform, they don’t, and it’s not. Without even going into the obscure formats, MP4, AVI, MOV and WMV video files are commonly found on a Windows system or Mac.
Which leads to the same question whether you’re on a Mac system or a Windows system: How do you watch all these incompatible video formats? There are, of course, plenty of commercial solutions from software developers around the world, both those that let you convert unsupported formats into standard formats and those that act as video players, but…. but there’s a great free solution from the open source community that I’ve been using for years: VLC.
Let me show you how this transpired when my daughter sent me a video from her latest volleyball game. It was, of course, in MOV format which meant that the Windows 10 Movies & TV app kinda sorta looked like it was going to work when I first launched it:
But it wasn’t more than a few seconds that the program realized that it had no idea what the MOV video format is and how to display it. So instead of a volleyball spike, I got an error message:
Missing codec: This item was encoded in a format that’s not supported. <sigh>
Fortunately VLC from Videolan is free, ad-free, and works great. So jump over to videolan.org and you’ll see this:
As you can see, it works everywhere, from Linux to Android, Windows to Mac. So handy! Click on Download VLC (kinda hard to miss that blue button, really) and it’ll get a copy of the program.
In fact, pay attention to the TaskBar; have you noticed before that the app button magically turns into a progress bar?
I know, you already know that. Excellent.
Once it’s downloaded, open up the installer and install VLC on your Win10 computer. You’ll know it’s installed when you then right-click on your MOV file and it shows up as an option in Open with…
Just a few moments later, you should be able to enjoy the video from your niece:
And that’s how ya do it and set up your Windows PC to allow you to watch MOV files. Along with a ton of other file formats too, as it happens. I’m a big fan of VLC, needless to say.
Pro Tip: While you’re here, please check out our extensive Windows tutorials and help articles. We’ve been on Windows since Win 3.1!
To play MOV in Windows 10, you can download and install VLC Media Player, QuickTime or any video player for Windows. If these video players still cannot help you watch MOV movie files in Windows 10, you can try an app like Handbrake or DumboFab to reencode your mov files to wmv or mp4 format.
Hello!
I can confirm that as 2019, the above won’t work on a windows 10 machine.
Just tried watching a MOV file in VLC on Windows 10 and it works just fine, Steve. Is it possible you have a corrupted VLC (which you can fix by deleting and downloading again) or a broken MOV file that wouldn’t play on anything?
So seeing as how you are a big fan of VLC maybe you can tell me why when I click on playback>renderer>family room tv…nothing shows up on my family room tv. My chromecast work s fine otherwise and I have the latest version of VLC. Thanks in advance.