Windows 7 is out and it’s really solid. It has out-of-the-box support for most popular audio and video formats. In fact, the only two I was missing was MKV (Matroska), and FLAC. The latter is easy to fix, the former not so much. If you do a Google search you will find over 8 MILLION hits, and pretty much all of the top hits did not actually tell you how to (successfully) get MKV support easily. The forum posts ask you to download codec packs, splitters, containers, use your imagination.

What you really need are two simple links:

• The DivX Tech Preview and
• The AC3 Filter (Full)

The first one gives native version of the DivX MKV framework for the newly introduced Windows Media Foundation. Anything else you download at the moment does NOT utilize the WMF. The problem with that is you lose hardware acceleration and everything needs to be transcoded (converted to another codec on the fly). If you use DivX’s codec you get a crisp picture that is not overexposed.

The only problem with the DivX tech preview is that sound didn’t work for any of my HD files. That’s where the AC3 filter comes in – it installs the necessary codec for you to get the sound. That is also what all the forums I came across failed to mention.

DivX Plus on Windows 7

So install those two and you are set for playing almost anything you can come across on the Internet without sacrificing quality or installing 3rd-party players like VLC (Which I tried and failed to configure to reproduce the same quality as Windows Media Player for any video format).