Hi, I have bought a sony handycam with software with it. I can watch my videos with the cam software but not windows media player. It says that i need this codec thingy? Been looking on the net but i dont want to download something i dont know anything about.

Can anyone help me?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

If you select "download codec automatically" within WMP then disable it it'll just DL the Sony one for your camera. From then onwards it'll work.

Otherwise, as already said, use VLC!! That plays anything!!!!

I don't use VLC any more since it had the nasty habit of causing my PC to reboot whilst playing Matroska (MKV) files, and no amount of messing around fixed it.

GOM Player is now my media player of choice. It has virtually all codecs built in, so you don't need codec packs etc. but you can use Windows codecs if you need to.