Xacti-friendly WMP codecs?

Hey all. This is almost certainly in the wrong section, and it may even be a FAQ, so please excuse a newbie who's a bit lost here...

I picked up an Xacti HD1 yesterday - I know it's not got great video quality, but I wanted a flash-based 720p unit for use on my motorcycles. I would always worry about an HDD unit being messed up or damaged by vibration. Also, the lighter weight (vs. other units at a remotely similar price point) should make me more comfortable with some different mounting options.


Not surprisingly, the software that ships with it is pretty much pure garbage. I don't mind doing some research to find some good HD NLE & authoring tools, but I'm really stuck on just finding a decent codec that will let me watch my clips in Windows Media Player 11.

Stupid RealPlayer can play them, but the UI is bad and the video quality is atrocious. I've been told that QuickTime and VLC can both play the 720p MP4's I get off the Xacti (using a card reader), and ZoomPlayer w/ FFDShow probably can, but Media Player is my player of choice, and I'd really much prefer having the necessary codecs installed so I can watch all of my clips from the same environment. I don't want to introduce a conversion step just so that I can watch this stuff.

I did some hunting around, and was very confused and a bit overwhelmed by what I found. So, for the purposes of this thread, let's assume that I'm a moderately sophisticated computer user who doesn't know a damn thing about AV stuff, and who doesn't want to install and configure 5 different pieces to watch these clips. Obviously I'd also prefer to not have to spend money, so there's probably some trade-off here (cost vs. ease of installation).

So, what are my options for watching 720p MP4's from my Xacti HD1 using Windows Media Player on XP Home?

Thanks for any info, advice, or pointers.

Thanks very much - here's what I ended up doing:

1) Install the current beta FFDShow (I haven't really figured out anything about how to configure it, I just accepted all defaults).

2) Convert the files using mp4cam2avi - this doesn't actually change the encoding, just the container. So it's pretty fast and doesn't introduce any loss.

VERY frustrating. It's insane to me that as more video content (camcorders, cable TV, etc.) moves into the digital domain, it actually gets HARDER to make it work with your computer (proliferation of formats and codecs, competing media, assinine DRM schemes, etc.).

BTW - QuickTime SUCKED at playing those files. On my 1.8 GHz Athlon 64 3000+ system with 1GB of RAM, QT used 100% of the CPU and still couldn't keep up. Not to mention the fact that it won't play full screen, and won't maximize on my 2nd monitor (pressing the maximize button maximizes it on the primary monitor). It was actually worse than RealPlayer (same bad issue with UI and no fullscreen playback - and some of the worst screentear I've seen since playing DOOM on a 386 laptop).

If mp4cam2avi can be invoked from the command line or scripted, then I think I'll put together some little proggy or VBS script to handle the import and conversion.

Thanks for the info,

UPDATE: With FFDShow installed, I was able to get WMP to play the files by just renaming them from a .MP4 extension to .MPG - no need to do the conversion to AVI. That's absolutely ludicrous!