Windows 8 windows live media player not working

I bought a brand new laptop in January 2013 with windows 8 installed already. The windows live movie maker does not work properly. It either has a black screen or the video is frozen when I import them into the media player for editing. I have sound but the video itself isn't working properly at all.  I saw another thread that said to change the windows movie maker to compatibality for windows 7 and supposedly it will work but all that did was make my movie maker stop working all together with an error message. I need to be able to edit videos because I record tutorials that need to be uploaded to youtube as part of my job. Please help.