I don't know if its the same for you guys or not, but every time I download a video from Limewire or a torrent, (legally) I spend 2 hours downloading it, then when I open it, windows tells me the "codec" is screwed up, and it only plays sound. And I download bunches of these, and each of them will not work. They can't be all screwed up. It must be my computer? what do I do?
You need to download a Codec Pack from somewhere so you can get all the codecs needed to play the file. There are many codecs out there and finding a good Pack is the best way to go about it. This will resolve all your issues with the videos you are trying to watch.