File types supported by Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center in Windows 7 can play many different music, video, and picture file types. You can even make Media Center the default player for specific types of files so that they'll open in Media Center when you double-click them. For more information, see Change the default music or video player.

To open a file in Media Center, you might need to first tell Media Center where you store your files. To learn how to do this, see Add media files to Windows Media Center.

Additional file formats might be supported if you install new codecs in Windows. For more information, see Codecs: frequently asked questions.

Video file types

The following table lists the video file types that are supported in Media Center.

Video file types (format)	File name extensions
Windows Media files	.wm, .wmv, and .asf
AVCHD files (including Dolby Digital audio)	.m2ts and .m2t
Apple QuickTime files	.mov and .qt
AVI files	.avi
Windows Recorded TV Show files	.wtv and .dvr-ms
MPEG-4 movie files	.mp4, .mov, and .m4v
MPEG-2 movie files	.mpeg, .mpg, .mpe, .m1v, .mp2, .mpv2, .mod, and .vob
MPEG-1 movie files	.m1v
Motion JPEG files	.avi and .mov

Note

Some video file types might not be supported when viewed on a Media Center Extender device. For example, some Extenders don't support AVCHD files or Apple QuickTime files.

Picture file types

The following table lists the picture file types that are supported in Media Center.

Picture file types (format)	File name extensions
JPEG files	.jpg and .jpeg
JPEG XR files	.hdp and .wdp
TIFF files	.tif and .tiff
RAW files	.raw
GIF	.gif
Bitmap files	.bmp
PNG files	.png

Note

Animated GIF files aren't fully supported. For this file format, you can view the still image but not the animation.