Media Player Clasic and VLC Media Player are easily the two best media players about, if you’re using spyware ridden RealPlayer or Quicktime, get rid of em now! Note that I use these media players mostly for playing videos, I use Winamp for music just because of habit really. You can get a plugin called Real Alternative to play RM files and I think you also get a Quicktime one but I’ve never used it as you need Quicktime for iTunes.
Windows Media Player is alright IMO but it’s annoying it can’t play partially downloaded DivX and XVid files which MPC and VLC both can. MPC needs time to ‘buffer’ and has problems when you skip ahead in a partially downloaded file, the picture is blurry for a few seconds. VLC seems to play fine straight away. I used to use MPC for all video files because it’s less sluggy, if you skip ahead or pause in VLC, it takes some noticeable time. But lately MPC is showing a green vertical bar in Xvid videos (which along with DivX is the most used codec of downloaded TV shows) which is very annoying. So it’s VLC now. But it could change again. What’s certain is the best free media player is one of these two. What do people prefer?
‘Spyware ridden’? ‘Quicktime’? You’d want to watch yourself; Apple is notoriously lawyer-happy and you don’t have the defence of truth here.
I didn’t actually call Quicktime spyware ridden, just Realplayer. I’m sure the judge will agree with me. 🙂
I find VLC will eat up anything you can throw at it. And the delay issues with MPC startup make me favour VLC for AV playback.
I imagine that green bar is a codec issue. MPC seems to be far more reliant on (and touchy about) your codecs than VLC.
I always used VLC myself to play back avi and mpeg files but i recently encountered a serious problem when i put Alan Partridge season 1 into my dvd drive! No media players would play it!”!!!!!””£”!!!
So i downloaded MPC and i have to say “WOW”
Tis’ grand like!
I might start using it over VLC now actually
VLC uses built in codecs, MPC uses you installed codecs
ya.mlc is like da shiznit. i bonded wit my spittle an now i’m skimmin’ my miniscus. wich is awsum wells. dude.
use vlc for playing any kind of .avi file…
though it takes a bit of time in ‘pause’ing than mpc…
but for playing .mkv file which has default res abt 720p*… definitely MPC…
I think mplayer is the best media player. But I don’t use it because of the hassle of install. I use VLC as well. Though when I ran ubuntu I was all about the mplayer.