Why stick to windows media player, you can use the free VLC player. It is capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac ...) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
You can download it here
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/