What's Your Favorite Media Player?

[cyclone12]

Just wondering what everyone's preferred media player is, Naturally Winamp is a must. It's a great player with a ton of skins to choose from. I also like Xion, it's a very simple music player with lots of cool skins. And when i'm feeling old school i crank up the DW Jukebox.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

my favorite would have to be 'whatever plays the file in question or connects me to the stream i want'. so i have MPC, videolan, winamp, real player and WMP installed currently.

i don't care about skins because if it's music, i have something else filling up the screen and if it's video, i have the video filling up the screen.

that jukebox sure is purty, tho. :)

 

[bob]

I really like Winamp for playing and weeding out those duplicate songs you get in torrents and the wife likes it too.

The jukebox program is awesome for us oldtimers. :)

I also just use whatever works for video, since the pc is not my preferrered way to watch videos.

I have noticed with Vuse, I can transcode my downloaded videos by dragging them from my Vuse Library to the Vuse PS3 box setting and then watch them anytime I want streaming on my widescreen TV through the PS3 by selecting them in the PS3>Vuse>Videos file on the PS3 . I do this with HD videos and the result is fabulous. I don't really understand this stuff, but it looks great on the big screen TV. The Pussycat Dolls look great in HD.

 

[Liteuser.]

My favorite is the KMPlayer. I watch my DVD's and listen to music and it plays all the video and audio formats I have. I made a few skins for it as well.

 

[TuNk77]

For music I use foobar2000 and for video I use KM Player, don't need anything else

 

[1234fd]

Winamp for sound, MediaClassicPlayer Home Cinema for video.
"Only the best is good enough"

 

[crazzycat]

Also Winamp is my fave

 

[faralos]

Wow lessee Winamp, realplayer, quicktime, anything that it comes in on usually defaults to my winamp tho, but I also have a wavepad editor and sound editor so a lot of the music i listen to gets chopped up for pins anyhow! i dont watch streaming videos on my computer heck i rarely watch them at all. i guess I'm too old-school I dont get into watching a video of a music group. (so much wasted time when I could be coding a pin!) Being 50, we grew up WITHOUT (gasp) MTV! or even stereo FM for that matter, (ah the good ol' says cruising down the Jersey Parkway listening to 77ABC on Am (wolfman jack was a dj back then!) hearing oldies (America, Don Mclean, The Jacksons, Dr. Dimento) sigh the good old days, AM radio (music NOT talk as it is now) then stereo FM hit and the rest is history man do I drift off the subject easily...

 

[da_prez]

VLC Media Player

far and away the best multi-purpose media player ... and it's free, fully loaded

 

[juancar]

I am a fan of Winamp because it has all the options I need (random, grouping, repeat). I've also used Windows Media Player a lot but I really prefer Winamp. Real Player is not one of my favorites, I don't like the interface and in my opinion usability is only avergae compared with Winamp.

 

[lucy]

Hi.
I use VLC media player.

 

[Timdart]

Hi All,
I hate to admit it but I often have to use Windows Media Player. I've tried ( and still try ) VLC and some of the other ones but if I want a no-headache experience then Windows Media Player is often my choice.

--gritting my teeth--

 

[mrschultz]

The last few updates of VLC have really improved it, at least on my system, when this thread started I was having some problems with some files and VLC, media player was working better most of the time, last few months I've been using VLC pretty much exclusively.

Even though I've got PowerDVD 9 I only use that for Blu-Ray discs, VLC is nicer for DVDs since it opens fast and right into the menu bypassing all the crap they put on the discs.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

You know, I don't think there is such a thing as a "favorite" media player; it's which one sucks least. Here's how I look at the major-release ones. RealPlayer's gonna lock up; it's a given, there's no two ways around it. One day you'll be using RP and you'll click on something too fast and, all of a sudden "this program is not responding". Windows MP blows. You've gotta put up with that stupid cover art listing of songs and there may be a way to change it, but I've screwed around with it enough to know that if it's not intuitive enough to easily change it away from showing every artist picture, then it doesn't need to exist. It also hates mp3 players. Or at least it did the last time I was using it as my primary media player about three years ago. If that's been fixed in subsequent versions... too late! Had your chance and you blew it, Gates! Winamp's layouts just... bug me. I don't know what it is, but I just want a simple layout without 5 fricking different frames looking at me. Again, there might be a way to fix this, but I don't want to have to think that hard just to play a song. Itunes is ridiculous. It locks up when you try to do the simplest tasks, it refuses to do an automatic update of your music library, so you have to manually drag and drop new music into it every single time, when there's an updated version, you have to download some 80MB monstrosity to update the goddamned Quick Time as well. But my Ipod loves Itunes so, by extension, I have to love Itunes. Sigh. I sure miss my Walkman.

 

[1234fd]

I have been using Winamp for the last nine years for all sound files. I have kind of barebone install as I do not use a lot of feature.I like the transparency a how I can personalize the aspect of my player + of course the Milkdrop visualisations that has no equal.

For video & DVD, I switched from VLC to Splayer, A minimalist chinese player with a fantastic quality of image.
Be careful to get the zip file ( no install) & not the exe file. Do not set any file associations, as it´s still a bit buggy. Then open you files using "open with"

I always try to use the very best& thes e are my solution actually,

 

[TuNk77]

One "problem" with VLC it that it does not support multithreads when playing MKV files, witch can make playback choppy. VLC it quite large 74.6 MB, 56.5 MB after deleting the unnecessary languages. But, over 50 MB for a simple mediaplayer is ridiculous. The year 2010 and they just now have "Experimental" support for GPU acceleration and only on a handful of Nvidia only cards! This in side by side playback against Splayer build 1372 has horrible color and lack of depth. The difference between HD and HD in a thick fog! Very few software developers build truly innovative cross platform applications. This is not one of them. They can't even claim to have done what all others have already! Kmplayer, Bsplayer, Splayer, MPC, WMP, and even Winamp all have successfully implemented H264 acceleration. VLC can't use shaders, like "Sharpen Complex". So I do recommend those of you who use VLC to try Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. It's smaller (25 MB). It can use shaders to enhance the image Take a look at this link (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Media_Player_Classic_Home_Cinema) and download the latest beta. Or try smplayer (portable download and NOT installer) even KMplayer is better than VLC.

 

[StevOz]

VLC is a 18.5MB download for the latest version 1.1 on windows and is also a cross platform application, runs the same here in XP or Linux Mint and includes all the needed codecs built in.

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema is also very good, though a much larger download once you include the needed codecs and as far as I know it's not cross platform like VLC is.

On the note of image enhancement, yes Media Player does have more options, though VLC does have image enhancement which works well Video > Post processing.