When your Windows Media Player stumbles upon issues, the direct method to fix it is to reinstall it. However, do you know how to reinstall Windows Media Player on your Windows-based devices? In this post, MiniTool Software will show you a simple guide.
Why do You Need to Reinstall Windows Media Player?
Windows Media Player is available for Windows-based devices. It is pre-installed on your Windows computer. Until now, Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7 are using Windows Media Player 12. But Windows Media Player is not available for Windows RT 8.1. (You can check which version of Windows you are using here).
In most cases, Windows Media Player can work well for playing videos and audio files. In rare cases, it may malfunction and you need to fix it. For example, your Windows Media Player may not show the video but only play sound, or Windows Media Player has no sound when playing videos. Of course, there are some other cases. We will not list all of them here.
All in all, it is simple to reinstall Windows Media Player. When you want to fix Windows Media Player, you can just try reinstalling it. On the other hand, if you can’t find it on your Windows computer and you are sure that your system supports it, you can also use this method to get it back.
How to Reinstall Windows Media Player?
How to Uninstall Windows Media Player?
Unlike uninstalling other programs on your Windows computer, you need to use a special method to uninstall Windows Media Player. You need to turn off Windows Media Player via Windows Features to uninstall it. Here are the steps:
1. Click Windows search.
2. Type features and select Turn Windows features on or off from the result.
Besides, you can also go to Control Panel > Programs and features > Turn Windows features on or off to open Windows Features.
3. Windows Features will show you all the features on your Windows computer no matter they are turn on or off. Then, you need to scroll down to find the Media Features Next, click it to expand it.
4. You will see Windows Media Player that is checked. Next, you need to uncheck it.
5. You will see a small pop-up window showing the result of turning off Windows Media Player. You need to click the Yes button to continue.
6. You will go back to the Windows Features interface. Then, click OK. The system will begin to search for required files and apply changes.
7. Click Close to exit the process and you will quit Windows Features at the same time.
8. Restart your computer. Windows Media Player will be uninstalled from your computer. If you don’t believe it, you can try to search it using Windows search and see whether it is available.
How to Reinstall Windows Media Player?
It’s time to get Windows Media Player back. You don’t need to download the installation file and then install it on your computer. You need to reload it using Windows Features.
Here is how to reload Windows Media Player on Windows:
1. Use the same method mentioned above to open Windows Features.
2. Scroll down and expand the Media Features option.
3. This time, you need to check Windows Media Player and click OK.
4. The system will begin to search for required files and apply changes.
5. Click Close when the process ends.
6. To successfully execute every change, you still need to restart your device. After that, you can go to check whether you can use this player as normal.
You can see it is not a difficult job to reinstall Windows Media Player on a Windows computer. When necessary, you can try this tool to fix your Windows Media Player issue.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Stella has been working in MiniTool Software as an English Editor for more than 7 years. Her articles mainly cover the fields of data recovery including storage media data recovery and phone data recovery, YouTube videos download, partition management, and video conversions.