[SOLVED] How to play MS or other videos

I'm not sure I can explain this well, but I went to the Win 7 training stuff and clicked the play arrow. It kept telling me I needed to download the latest Media Player (already have it) and then, the video first went into downloads and I'd have to open it from there and click play again. This just doesn't seem right to me. If I want to play a video online, I should just hafta hit play w/o going through this other junk, right?

Btw, I did look in my reference material before asking this, but couldn't find an answer there.

This is getting frustrating. I'm trying to learn this OS, but every time I want to watch an instructional video, I have to wait until it's downloaded to my computer. Not only does that slow me down, it also bloats my hard drive. I'm now in the process of downloading theWindows Essentials package. Maybe that will make a difference.

I discovered the confusion. Trying to play a video in Firefox required a manual download of the media player plug-in. I think it's time to just lean completely on Microsoft.