I'm afraid I have to agree with Ant here. M$ have hyped up a lot of their products in the last two years and to be honest they've simply put a mediocre amount of effort into lots of products rather than a real effort for a smaller quantity of projects.
Bottom line: they're just a big crap PR machine that fails at even building up enough PR. If Microsoft were successful they'd basically be like Apple, not that Apple is a good company. Just better.
Back on topic, yeah, just install more codecs and shit 'till it works