Well then you should virus scan anything you download, and only download from trusted sites and not torrent clients, p2p etc.

Plus if you were downloading "free" copies of media players which are supposed to be paid for then what do you expect?

And I highly doubt that the only way to remove it is to format your machine. What are the virus names?
What was the media player you were downloading?
What anti virus do you have?
Is it up to date?
Did you Google the virus name for a remover?
Did you scan the download before opening it?
Where did you download it from?

A good warning has all these things answered in the first post and not just a random message full of caps and symbols.

If you had asked about the virus chances are we could have looked into a way of removing it, instead of you formatting your machine. Still, lesson learned eh

(maybe a change of name would be appropriate huh computergeek22? lol)