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A .wlmp file won't open because Movie Maker is gone

A .wlmp is a Windows Movie Maker 2012 project, and nothing else Microsoft ships today opens it. Not Photos, not Clipchamp, not Media Player. If the PC is new, or Windows was reinstalled, Movie Maker is simply not there any more, so double-clicking the file does nothing useful or Windows asks which app to use.

Microsoft's own page says Windows Essentials 2012, the free bundle Movie Maker came in, "is no longer supported on Windows 10, and is unavailable for download" since 10 January 2017. Copies that were already installed kept working. Here is how people get it back on Windows 10 and 11, what goes wrong, and what else you can do with the project.

Before you install anything

Check two things first, because they decide whether Movie Maker can help at all.

Is there a finished video already? If anyone ever chose Save movie, Movie Maker wrote an .mp4 or .wmv, usually in the Videos folder and usually with the same name as the project. Search the drive for the project's name. That file plays anywhere and needs none of this.

Are the photos and clips still around? A .wlmp holds no media of its own, only the full path to each file on the computer that made it. Open a copy in Notepad and look for filePath=": every one of those is a file Movie Maker will want. If they were on a drive that has since been wiped, reinstalling Movie Maker gets you a project full of yellow warning triangles and nothing else. The page on missing media covers putting them back.

Getting Movie Maker 2012 back

The small web installer Microsoft used to hand out (wlsetup-web.exe) no longer works, because the files it downloads were taken down. What does still work is the full offline installer, wlsetup-all.exe, which the Internet Archive keeps at archive.org/details/wlsetup-all_201802 (choose "Windows Executable"). I downloaded that copy on 25 October 2026: it is 137,329,840 bytes, version 16.4.3528.0331, and Windows reports a valid digital signature from Microsoft Corporation. You can check the same thing on yours before running it: right-click the file, Properties, Digital Signatures.

  1. Run wlsetup-all.exe and choose "Choose the programs you want to install", not "Install all of Windows Essentials".
  2. Untick everything except Photo Gallery and Movie Maker.
  3. If Windows asks to turn on .NET Framework 3.5, let it download and install. Windows 10 and 11 do not have it switched on out of the box.
  4. Restart when it finishes, even if it did not ask. Several people on Microsoft's forum only found the Movie Maker shortcut after a restart.
  5. Open Movie Maker from the Start menu, then File, Open project, and pick the .wlmp.

I have not installed it on Windows 11 myself. These steps are the ones in the guides and forum threads below that report it working.

If the installer fails

The error people report most is 0x800c0006. One Microsoft Q&A user hit it on Windows 11 even with .NET 3.5 already installed, and the thread never found a single fix. A Spanish guide on Genbeta says that when the error's source is listed as UXPlatformLang, the cause is a Windows display language other than English, and that adding English (United States) under language settings, switching to it, signing out and running the installer again gets past it. Others in the Microsoft thread got through by restarting and running it a second time.

Stay away from anything in the Microsoft Store or on download sites called "Movie Maker" that is not this installer. Microsoft's support page warns that sites offering free Movie Maker downloads "are not offering sanctioned Microsoft products", and one Q&A poster found their "free trial" Movie Maker had Save locked until they paid. The real one never had a trial; it was free.

Saving the project as a video

Once the project opens with all its pictures showing, use the Save movie button at the top right and pick "Recommended for this project". Movie Maker 2012 writes an MP4 that plays on anything. Keep the installer somewhere safe afterwards; it is the only copy you can count on.

Movie Maker 2012 is unsupported software that gets no security fixes. It is fine for getting old projects out, but I would not keep it as the everyday editor.

If you can't install it, or you're not on Windows

Slideback reads the .wlmp in the browser instead, on Windows, a Mac or a Chromebook. Drop the project on the WLMP to MP4 page, choose the folder your photos and clips are in now, and it matches each file by name, then plays the movie with its trims, transitions, pan and zoom, titles and music. The check and the preview are free; saving the MP4 is US$19 once. Nothing is uploaded.

It is not a perfect copy of Movie Maker. Clips in WMV, AVI or MOD have to be converted to MP4 first, because browsers cannot decode them. A few transitions (shatter, stars, page curl) are drawn as something simpler, some effects such as edge detection are left off, title animations are close rather than exact, and the music is not ducked under narration the way Movie Maker did it. The page lists whatever applies to your project before you pay. Turning a project into an MP4 without Movie Maker goes through the other routes too.

Other old project files

A file ending in .mswmm comes from the older Movie Maker in Windows XP and Vista, which 2012 cannot open directly; Slideback reads those too, and the .mswmm page covers the other ways. A .wp3 is a Photo Story 3 project, which is a different case again, because the photos are inside it.

Sources

Updated 25 October 2026.