Posted on Friday, April 05, 2013 at 12:48 pm CDT
Codecs are a specialist piece of software that is needed to decode video files for playback. Without the correct codec installed on the system, the file cannot be played. This is often extremely annoying for computer users, especially for users of Windows 8, which does not come with a huge number of codecs already installed.
Source: Windows 8 Codecs