Whilst in the USA last week I bought a Surface 2 tablet. Upon boot it ran around 20 updates, as you expect, but unfortunately one of these seemed to remove its ability to play MP4 videos, giving a 0xc00d36b4 error whenever you try. A bit of a pain as one of the main reasons I wanted a tablet was for watching training videos and PluralSight on the move.

After a fiddling and hunting on the web I found I was not alone, so I added my voice to the thread, and eventually an answer appeared. It seems the Nvidia Audio Enhancements seem to be the problem. I guess they got updated within the first wave of updates.

So the fix is according to the thread is as follows

  1. Go to the desktop view on your Surface
  2. Tap and hold the volume icon. 
  3. Select sounds from the pop up menu - I only had to go this far as a dialog appeared asking of I wished to disable audio enhancements (maybe it found it was corrupt)
  4. Go to the playback tab
  5. Highlight the speakers option
  6. Select properties
  7. Go to the enhancements tab
  8. Check the “Disable all enhancements” box
  9. Tap OK.

And videos should now play

Updated 2 Dec  2013 Seems you have to make this change for each audio device, this means speaker AND headphones