Quote:
Originally Posted by hrn
I think Windows Media Player is the best.
I've used VLC as a video player and it's nice, feels kind of old though in the surface. Win 3.11 feel...
Winamp is fast and a good player too.
Could not be without Media Player myself.
...AND, I stay away from Real and Quicktime

What a mess...
Yah... I LIKE the no frills GUI on
VLC... it's like all those MDA plugs...
BTW, I have so many players on my machine, it's just sad. But I use
MusicMatch for listening to my subscription service (MM On Demand, so, it's necessary). But MM is a bigtime memory leaker (it's like a fragmentation bomb going off in your RAM) so if I have most media set up to default to
WinAmp -- and I reboot or at least log off, usually, if I'm going to do any serious audio work after using MusicMatch.
Seriously, MM makes a 60-100 MB hole in memory... even logging off and back on usually doesn't clear/release it, though I have my machine set up to NOT reload the MM components that MM tries to keep in your boot profile. (NO loaders. From any player. Ever. MM's loader actually SLOWS down its already glacial loading.)
Too bad, MusicMatch Jukebox Plus (or whatever the $20 version's called) has a great feature set with all kinds of control over MP3 and other formats -- even a timer for programming unattended recording... used to use it to grab favorite radio shows before the podcast era.
WinAmp has a couple 'features' that used to drive me around the bend but I'm used to them more or less now.
And then from there on out, whichever player has lately fought dirtiest for my file associations usually gets the shot. Actually most of my players are pretty well behaved. I don't have RealPlayer (
RealAlternative instead) so I don't have to hassle with it and its crap.
And then that just leaves
Quicktime Pro in the can't-trust-it category. As I said above somewhere, I need it for my cam's vid output or I would throw Quicktime Pro into the deepest hole in cyberspace and count my $30 a good lesson about who not to deal with.
(I'm STILL royally pissed off that the upgrade from QT Pro 6.5 to 7 is full price and that I would have to uninstall QT Pro to use the hobbled nagware version. Honest to gosh I do not think I have EVER dealt with a software company that charged full price for a half point upgrade. Although the evil fonks at RealNetworks did sell me a "lifetime upgrade" to the RealPlayer only to have them, not more than a year or two later, come out with RealPlayer G2 which they claimed was a 'whole new' product, and hence not covered by my "lifetime upgrade." Needless to say I NEVER gave RealNetworks another penny and never will.)