If you don't want any codecs installed, you may want to check out mplayer for windows (www.mplayerhq.hu). It's still without a GUI, but it works like a charm. However, there are still few attempts to build a gui for it, but you have to search for the one that suits you. On the other hand, i use MV2 Player (http://mv2.czweb.org/), a freeware player that has a lot of functions and works perfectly. But it requires codecs instalation. I, for example, use only ffdshow, latest build and in 99.9% of cases, don't need another. Hope that helps. P.S. Yes, I know, MV2 Player build is old but still does the job well. :-) BTW, both handle video and audio files perfectly.