windows media player is useless

[realspeed]

If you want to play MOV files in windows media player forget it with windows 10 anyway. The best windows media player can handle is MP4, isn't it about time microsoft updated this program ?

[johns0]

Most people here never use windows media player,i haven't used it in 20 years,i use media player classic hc,others use different players such as vlc and pot player and others.

[realspeed]

fair comment I don't either usually. It is just that I did a test video for myself and couldn't work out why the MOV video didn't play sound, only video. Took me a bit of head scratching to find out why

[Cornucopia]

WMP is fine for what it is: a stock basic media player for windows-centric files, for the "i donʻt know, and i donʻt care to know" masses. As long as your expectations arenʻt more than that, itʻll work reasonably well.
It relies on Directshow/MS Foundation (and, formerly, ActiveMovie, VFW), so as long as your files are covered by those architectures, it should play it.

Guess what ISNʻT covered by those architectures, and never has been: Quicktime (MOV). Not counting the original v1 and v2 codec formats (which were built on a much older but more cross-compatible architecture), all v3-v7.x, and v10.+ formats cannot be supported in WMP (OR ANY OTHER Dshow-based apps), without a 3rd party shim plugin that provides a bridge to parse & decode the files.
Part of that is Appleʻs doing, not Microsoftʻs.

The better media player apps recommended to you are in part better because they arenʻt using that architecture as their foundation, they are using ffmpeg and similar extensible open-source architectures, or are using a combo of multiple architectures. Or they are using those 3rd party plugins (e.g. LAV filters).

Scott