VLC media player

[eclectica]

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

This looks like a good all in one media player, and it handles audio and video as well as allows streaming. It's open source. Who the hell would want to use Windows Media player? I had fun with this when I realized that by opening up an mp3 file while another was playing, it did not close the other one, so I had two different mp3s playing at the same time on my computer. It uses about 28 MB of memory when running though. I don't know how it performs on older slower computers.

I had trouble getting the sound with a .mov file, which had a QuickTime audio codec that doesn't come with the program. You can find what audio and video codecs are working in the video by opening it with the player and then going to View->Stream and Media info. I found out I needed the audio codec for QDM2. Then in a forum thread here (http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=410) I found the QDM2 dll file here:
http://www.videolan.org/pub/testing/win32/qtmlClient.dll
Which I placed into the directory C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC, and I was then able to get it to play the QDM2 audio.

[slx]

i'm always looking for a better media player...i don't use WMP unless it's the only thing that works

for tunes.....i use musicmatch with the dfx plugin

for movies....zoomplayer is the way to fly

a little, freeware prog, GSpot gives you all the needed info, re:codecs, etc

[napho]

It plays .bin files and sometimes the 1st part of a rar archive if you need that.

[Criminal_Sniper]

foobar2000 for music by far the best music player that ive ever used
and media player classic for movies and dvd's

videolan always seemed to be far ahead of itsself while some core features were not stable yet
im not sure how it has changed though in the last month or two

[eclectica]

This program doesn't do well when playing mp3s. For example, if I'm playing my mp3 and I open the browser on the computer the sound is interrupted. Winamp Lite does a better job.

[eclectica]

I tried to capture a screenshot from a movie playing with the VLC player. I paused the scene I wanted and it looked fine but when I saved it in a graphics program the file would be black once I closed the VLC player. In fact the captured image would stay still while scrolling in the graphics program I pasted it to. So the image seen when pasting was only an illusion that ceased once the program was closed. The way to really capture an image can be found by disabling overlay mode in the program's video preferences. The overlay mode sends the image right to the graphics card, which is better quality, but won't allow you to take screenshots. I searched on the VLC forums and found a thread relating to the subject. I didn't find a way to disable the overlay mode in the program's video preferences, but a trick I found was to open the file twice, having two versions of the program running. On the second one opened, I was able to capture the screen shot of what I saw, because only the first program opened was able to use overlay mode. You can read the thread in their forum on this subject here (http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=1105).

[eclectica]

I found a good program for playing audio. Quintessential Player (http://www.quinnware.com/) plays wav, mp3, ogg, and audio CDs. I tested it and the sound does not get interrupted by other processes opening on the computer while it is playing. Also when it plays audio CDs it puts no gap between the tracks, which is good when you listen to a CD where one song fades into the next.