i just purchased a new computer (HP P6110F20W) with vista as a os and i was importing a bunch of my old movies from my laptop (ZD8000) which runs xp. i remember that when i got my laptop i had to have a friend help me with what filter i needed and which codecs i needed. the problem is that he just did it for me and didn't explain what i needed and why so now i am lost again. i looked up what filter i was running AC3 filter_1_46. so i went to this site and looked up the most up to date ac3 filter (AC3filter_1_63) and downloaded it, it didn't give me video but gave me audio of the old movies i had transferred. any ideas what i need?

Get the Standard version of the K-Lite Codec Pack. That is a small pack with all the essential filters that you need.

Try downloading the "Vista Codecs Pack" from codecs.com, and do a custom install. If you have either realplayer or quicktime or divx already, you will need to either remove them or turn off that option in codec package install. If none of these were installed, do a full install. On page you will need to search for VistaCodecs in their search bar.
Once installed you will need to run the configuration as admin, and configure the ffmpeg audio and video configuration and set the ac3, a52 and x.264 options for one of their lib* types. Similarly for video types set this up for what your old videos used.

Another option other than codec pack is VideoLAN player, which has all codecs used in many videos and audio used in the clips. Download this at videolan.org

thank you very much this did the trick.