I recently set up a new PC running Windows 8.1 (an awesome HTPC, which will get a dedicated blog post in the future). Unfortunately, I quickly ran into the highly frustrating issue that many of my Metro (yeah, I still use that term – get over it) apps just wouldn’t start.

Some apps (e.g. Store, Skype, Camera) would work well, but others like Music, Video, Halo Spartan Assault (which I was really looking forward to playing on my TV) would crash immediately after startup.

Initially, I suspected the usual culprit and quickly updated the video card driver, but quite surprisingly that didn’t solve the issue. After collecting some error codes from the Windows event logs and Googling with Bing for while, I was able to track down the problem though.

It turns out the issue was the “N” version of Windows 8.1 I was using. Wait, what!? “N” Version!? What’s that? Well here’s the thing:

Due to some stupid European lawsuits and legal battles against Microsoft, special “N” versions of Windows had to be produced. These “N” versions do not come with a preinstalled Windows Media Player and are therefore also missing any kinds of preinstalled media codecs.

I checked my MSDN Subscriber Downloads page again and there it was – almost unmissable: “N” version – turns out I missed it nonetheless.

Very well – missing codecs actually would explain the weird behavior of the Music and Video apps. Also games are very likely to employ video codecs, which obviously was the case for “Spartan Assault”.

Some kind of error message about missing codecs would have been nice though, instead of just crashing. Especially when it comes to stock apps like Music or Video.

But anyhow, once I had figured out that peculiarity of Windows “N” versions, it was merely a matter of downloading the Media Feature Pack for N and KN version of Windows 8 and all the apps were working fine.

Now that this issues is solved, I decided to blog about it. That way I can safely forget about its details but look it up in the future, if it becomes a problem again :-).