Darla from Montana has a problem with some mysterious files on her hard drive. She has several external hard drives on which she had numerous HD home videos and pictures backed up. When she changed computers, there were several files she couldn’t open. It seems that the extensions for these files were MTS, M2TS, and so forth, and she would get the message “This file isn’t playable. That might be because the file type is unsupported, the file extension is incorrect, or the file is corrupt.”
Fortunately, this problem is fairly easy to solve. To understand how Windows works, you need to know that Windows keeps a database of all the file extensions it knows about. If Windows looks at a file and the file extension is associated with a program, it will launch that program and tell the program to open the file. However, if you’re on a system that doesn’t know about that extension, you’re going to get an error message.
In Darla’s case, the difference was the programs she had installed. Every time you install a new program, part of the installation process is telling Windows that it can handle MTS and M2TS files, and that kind of thing. On her old computer, she had a program installed, maybe her video editor, maybe a movie player, that handled those extensions, and she hasn’t installed it on the new system.
The good news is that there’s a free program that handles almost every kind of video file and video extension, and that’s VLC player. It’s a smart program that can handle a lot of different formats, including MTS files. If you want, you can convert it with VLC into another file format that you may prefer. H.264 is a great file format for almost all your videos, and if you’ve got H.265 files on your drive, usually .mp4, you should be able to play them back with almost anything.
To summarize, if you have MTS or M2TS files that you can’t play, download and install VLC player. VLC player can handle almost every kind of video file and extension, including MTS, and it’s a great program to have on your computer. Use it to convert the files into another file format that you prefer, like H.264.
In conclusion, Darla’s problem with mysterious files on her hard drive is easily solved by downloading and installing VLC Player. This free program is a great tool to have on your computer and can handle almost every kind of video file and extension. Use it to convert your files into a different file format that you prefer.