Who amongst us hasn’t had problems playing back media files, be they MP3s, DVDs, AVIs or audio CDs? Yes, we’ve all been there and resolving faults in media players can be a nightmare. A lot of the time it’s down to missing or faulty Codecs.

They’re the little add-ons and plug-ins that media players rely on to untangle the coded or compressed code in a media file. The thing is, if your PC is anything like Propellerhead’s you probably have shed-loads of them, but there’s usually no easy way to see what you’ve got, or if they’re all working properly, which is where Sherlock – The Codec Detective comes in.

This tiny freeware utility (the download is only 80kb) displays all of the codecs on an Windows XP PC, checks to see if any of them are ‘broken’ then warns you about it and generates a log file, for an expert to peruse if you can’t figure it out. In case you’ve forgotten or you are new here there are lots more great tips, tweaks and utilities to try at PCTopTips