What do I do when Windows media player doesn't show visual only sound, how do I fix it?

Question

It shows the graphical simulation of the sound but not the actual avi file

Answer 1

Most likely, you don't have the codec needed to view the video. However, it should have gone out and look for that automatically if you had that enabled.

Some people like to install "codec packs", which basically installs most of the codecs that you'd ever encounter. Personally, I just install ONE product... FFDShow at free-codecs.com