Which media player is your favorite

[Reino]

zoom player + my more stable version of corone's filter pack

for everything.

there's only one downside i've ever found to using directshow filters for everything: p*** poor support for regular music cds. the gabest cda filter is really horrible, but now that i know how to manually register directshow filters i'll probably dig up a better one.

Hello #rootworm,

What exactly is so horrible about the CDDA Filter? I'm not the one who uses this filter every day, because I never listen to CD's to be honoust, but of course I tested it before putting it in my DSFP. I didn't encounter anything serieus.

[#rootworm]

it's not your fault for including it in your pack. i think it's the only open source one available, everyone uses it.

it is super unreliable. it crashes like nothing else and is very slow. it's fine if you just stick a cd in and play it through from start to finish, but after skipping a couple tracks it freezes and locks up ZP.

can't even end ZP until i open up the CD drive.

have tested it on multiple installs but so far not yet on different hardware. happens with ANY cd.

[salival]

Windows Media Player 11

[Fox Mulder]

MPUI and MPC + FFDShow for video

XMPlay for audio

http://www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html

[The Apache]

Windows Media Player 11

right on brother!

[salival]

Windows Media Player 11

right on brother!

Of course! Been using it since version 10 (when I switched from Mac to PC) and fell in love with it ever since.

sal

[The Apache]

good.

[efrain]

VLC Media Player! This player almost supports all existing codecs. And Best of all.... its a FREEWARE!

[Fungus]

MPUI+mplayer, mpc+ffdshow+reclock+ac3filter+coreavc

nothing else matters.

[ckit]

Media Player Classic Homecinema (video player)

Windows Media Player 10 (video player for Now Playing playlists)

foobar2000 (audio player)

AC3Filter, DivX Pro, FFDShow Filters, QuickTime, VP6 and VP7, XviD

Edited October 10, 2007 by ckit

[CelticWhisper]

For video:

VLC 0.8.whateverwasnewacouplemonthsago

Things I like:

-Integrated support for the vast majority of codecs.

-Relatively small, lightweight

-Open source

-Open source

-Open source

-A lot of control over video playback. Can change aspect ratio, stretch, squeeze, zoom, distort, etc. the display just about any way you please. Cool before I had my widescreen monitor - I'd stretch a video file across my twin 17" LCDs. It was distorted a bit, but kinda neat.

-Lots of streaming/network support

Things I don't like:

-Still a little buggy. Nowhere near as crash-prone as a few versions ago though (Re: MacOSX version. Dunno about win/lin versions)

-No support for WMV/RM. They're lame codecs, but I'd still like to see them supported.

-Deinterlace seems imperfect. Apple DVD player, and hardware DVD players, can deinterlace a DVD with no visible reduction in image quality. VLC always seems to blur it, no matter what deinterlace method I try.

Things I want:

-Support for the aforementioned codecs, and maybe (Cthulhu help us) Indeo/IV50 for those people who actually encode with it in this day and age.

-Individual post-proc/deinterlace settings per file in the playlist. For example: going from a 1080p file where post-proc completely halts playback due to CPU load to a blocky rip of Stargate or something where post-proc cleans up the image a lot would be much easier if it would remember to post-process and clean up the blocky file but not even think of touching the h.264 1080p monstrosity.

-Export feature/built-in transcoding. Foobar2000 can do this with audio, exporting a .wav to an .ogg or some such. It would be cool if VLC were able to transcode and export anything its built-in codec repository supports. Much less intimidating than wrestling with the syntax and ludicrous number of options in ffmpeg.

For audio:

On my Mac, Cog:

Things I like:

-Uber-small. Just a playlist, controls, and optional stream info. Zat iz it.

-Plays a wide range of formats. iTunes can't handle my FLAC files out-of-the-box, and so iTunes can go stuff it. Cog has yet to choke on a format I throw it.

Things I don't like:

-... ... ...Not a whole helluva lot. With an app this small, it's hard to nitpick.

Things I want:

-Again, built-in transcoding would be cool.

-More hotkeys, or better documentation of hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts. I like being able to manipulate GUI apps with keyboard commands. The Mac has historically been great for that and it would be nice to know what everything is in Cog. Then again, I might just be too lazy and the answers are waiting in the README or something.

-iPod read/write support would be nice for those who need it, but most Mac users I know who have iPods just use iTunes to update them. Mine runs RockBox so I just update via Finder. Still, it would be cool to be able to update myPod without having to launch that memory-chomping behemoth iTunes.

On Win32:

Foobar2000

Things I like:

-Super-duper-small. Something like a 7MB memory footprint to WMP and iTunes' 40MB+.

-Again, plays every format under the sun.

-Built-in transcoding! Great for video game music junkies like me who get those emulated/chiptune sound files like .vgm, .gym, .psf, .gsf, etc. Can queue them up and spit out WAVs to then compress to whatever I want.

Things I don't like:

-Lack of a volume slider. Again, this might be me being too lazy to configure it, but I was a little confounded by the lack of a volume slider, especially when it started blasting tunes at max volume. The up/down arrow keys work, but there seems to be a delay before the increase/reduction in volume takes effect.

Things I want:

-A volume slider

...that's about it for Foobar

[clidx]

I'm using wmp11 with the k-lite codec pack and have never had any problems. i especially like wmp's toolbar mode. it looks more streamlined into my theme than itunes' and all the necessary features for music are right there.

but for dvds I use powerdvd 6... it came with my burner so i may as well... and wmp can't compare to powerdvd when it comes to dvds imo.

[weEvil]

I reccomend MPlayer with SMplayer frontend. It plays all the formats under the sun.

Its got a tiny footprint and it does all those things like sharpen, postprocessing, soften...etc. They're not adjustable though. Its either soften, or no soften.

I like Lord_Moulder's build from Doom9. He puts it together in one package and its also optimized for a few CPU types, so you get a little bit of 'free' performance.

Here's his stuff:

http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/home/?page=projects

He's also got some other cool utilities.

Also, winamp for Audio. Its even great to sync devices like iPods, WMA certified players and etc.

I don't like version 5.5 though. Its a little too much. But it still beats the rest, no contest.

Edited October 31, 2007 by brucevangeorge

[Keilaron]

For audio, Foobar2000, hands down.

For video, a mix of gplay, mplayer2 (the "old" windows media player), and MPC.

As for my choice of codec pack, the CCCP. Hasn't let me down.

Things I want:

-A volume slider

...that's about it for Foobar

You mean the one in the statusbar? It's kind of weird that they hid it there, but yes, there is one.

Just click where the volume is currently shown (the x.xxdB part of the statusbar).

Also, I think (but don't quote me on that!) you can get one elsewhere if you use a different UI plug-in.

[anonymous_user]

Foobar2000 for music and Media Player Classic (w/ VCP) for videos. Both are light and work well.