How to play MPG and WMV on Windows 8?

I'm new to Windows 8.0 being a former WebTV user and not very computer literate. How do I download MPG and WMV on Windows 8?
Please keep it simple and I thank you for your help.

Subject line says Play but body says Download. For "download" I have no opinion. For play I like SPlayer Portable. It seems to work well on machines without super powered graphics hardware.

There's a link to the portable version lower down on the page. I think it's more robust than the installer version(although that bug I encountered may have been fixed by now.)

From the Start Screen (the screen with all the big buttons from where you can launch programs), try and find File Explorer. If you can't, then right click (a bar shows up on the bottom), click All Apps. File Explorer should be there, double click on it. In File Explorer, on the left there should be a panel with libraries - videos. That's where most videos files should go automatically. If you downloaded them, they should be in the same panel in the dowloads folder. Click on each folder to see its content, then you can double click each file and it should automatically play for you (with Windows Media Player which is included in Windows 8).