Windows Media Player still refuses to work after 1.5 years of tech support "help"

I am having a problem getting Windows Media Player to work on the Vista guest VM (It works fine in XP, but I was hoping to use Vista instead). Every time I attempt to play ANY MOVIE FILE I get the following message. "WINDOWS CAN NOT PLAY THE SELECTED FILE. IT IS EITHER NOT A SUPPORTED FILE TYPE OR THE PROPER CODEC IS NOT INSTALLED."

I've tried the following: loaded nearly all the popular codecs manually, I've switched out 3 new MacBook Pro 17 laptops, I've tried 3 different builds of Parallels, 3 completely different versions of Windows Vista, the last FOUR releases of Windows Media Player and still the same error every time. Parallels support was contacted by telephone and email, and nothing productive came out of it - they just blamed one aspect or another of my setup (all elements have been completely swapped out and reloaded fresh at least 3x now). Microsoft tech support has "never had this problem before" also they "DON'T SUPPORT PARALLELS VMs" and blames it all on Parallels.

Does ANYBODY have a clue as to what may be happening here? Parallels doesn't seem to care about this at all.

Sincerely Frustrated

PS Is Vista even worth it? Does Aero work? Is it slow or fast compared to an XP Pro VM? I'm not so sure it's worth all of this to get Vista!

 

Please try this
1. Minimize hardware acceleration level in display properties.

Right click on Desktop -> Personalize -> Display Settings -> Advanced
Settings -> Trobleshoot tab. Put hardware acceleration level to zero.

2. Set Color in Display Settings to 24 bit making hardware acceleration
set to maximum.

 

Thanks

I'll try that.

 

That did it, They play now, but boy do they look crappy. They are all washed out and have artifacts all over the place that don't show up when I run it natively on the Mac or PC. Any suggestions.

 

Set video memory less than 256 mb