The Media Player War; Codecs, Crashes and Cleanliness

Posted by george

November 2, 2008

“Mommy, whats a codec?”

In today’s fast paced world it seems unlikely that anyone really cares which media player they use. All your average Joe cares about is his tunes and tracks. As long as he can hear them, he doesn’t care. Stop being a party spoiler Joe, and listen up. With all those media players like Windows Media Player, Winamp, Media Player Classic, iTunes, QuickTime, VLC, GOM Player, Real Player and so on, and on … it becomes hard to tell which is best.

Here is a link to a Wikipedia article describing all of them, but reading it is a pain in the lower orifice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_players_(software)

I’ll be covering the aspects of responsiveness, features, benign features and codec compatibility when giving my final judgement. Remember, please comment, and visit this site every day like it’s your ex’s MySpace. Ok Joe, so you’re probably thinking, “so what there’s a better player out there? Mine works and that’s all I care about.” Ok well, it’s like buying a HD TV. You never know how much better it is until you’ve seen it and once your used to it you can’t go back. Remember, I’m only rating free software or the free versions.

First off, only use mainstream players. The more other people use the same software, the more chance there is that those illegal torrent-downloaded movies and music will work properly. This is why I will only be comparing Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, QuickTime, Real Player and VLC player.

Windows Media Player 11

The upgrade to 11 was a major step in increasing the popularity of the player. WMP 11 comes with windows so there is less haste installing it and more importantly, it’s integrated; updates can come via windows update. The marketing of music stores is a little aggressive but with the right settings, it’s not too difficult to hide away.

Its clean and simple, and aesthetically pleasing (sexy). The library and playlist functions are the best I have seen with easy to use search, advanced grouping and quick playlist making ability in either M3U or WPL format. WMP monitors selected directories and adds new files to your library. The Rip, Burn and Sync functions top it off as an all round, clean, simple media player.

A major benefit is the easy media server setup. In a few clicks, you can stream media to your Xbox, PS3 or other client. However, it lacks iPod support. This, however, can be overcome with a plug-in called MGTEK. Google it.

iTunes

Generally seen as a slow, bloated and yet featureless program bundled with the iPod. Apple forces us to use it at our own expense and is constantly trying to sell their music download service to you. There is no folder monitoring so you’re stuck with adding new songs individually and format support is limited. You can have movies in apple’s proprietary formats, or songs, that’s it. This is unlike WMP, which supports any format you can find a codec for.

For the geeks out there, it installs two running services and another two start-up applications to monitor for an iPod being plugged in. the folder organisation is crap as it adds its own music folder to yours.

It has nice visualisations and a simple interface, and even takes the liberty to set up media sharing (yes - it shares all your stuff over the network) without bothering you. The constant huge updates are of course a bonus as we know that apple is working hard add new features (read: bugs) and modify existing ones just for a little variety now and then. You even need an account to download album artwork.

Winamp

Winamp 5.54 ups the ante with strong support for portable devices, including iPods, the ability to sync non-DRMed files to your PC from your device, an optional new interface layout and a built-in browser for media discovery. I liked that clicking on an artist’s name will get you related headlines and Web sites in a separate pane. There’s also Podcast support, device synchronization that lets you tweak the sync list while in progress, and continued support for AOL’s excellent Shoutcast. The new Bento layout is worth mentioning, too, because it gets the venerable llama away from the old modular format. The joined panes for the browser, media player, artist list, album list and more make Winamp instantly more visually appealing. There’s also an Auto-Tag feature, which will download metatags from the Gracenote database.

If you want MP3 encoding and full-speed CD burning, you have to shell out $19.95 for the Pro version. However, there are other problems. Automatic album art download support is spotty at best. More importantly, there are some stability issues when playing videos, and occasional program crashes were far more common than they should be.

QuickTime

QuickTime is like a castrated version of iTunes. It takes ages to load, but is very simplistic, so easy to use. There are features for playback of very high quality video and audio. One look in the preferences shows the enormous capacity yet feature simplicity of the program. If you pay for the pro version, you get basic video editing features (yes, that simple, that easy) and a HUGE range of codec’s to both decode and encode video.

Real player

One of the dinosaurs of media playback, RealPlayer has been on the scene since 1995. Sometimes it feels like it hasn’t been updated since then, no matter what the version number says.

The player runs smoother than ever, which to some might not be saying much, but if you haven’t used it in years, the differences are dramatic. Now the free version of the player has the ability to download videos from the Internet, including Flash-based videos like those on YouTube.

Once installed, mousing over an embedded video will provide a pop-up that not only lets you download the vid, but also change its name, the save-to directory, and other options.

The update sees a major face-lift, as well, removing much of the clutter from the downloadable music store. Though not groundbreaking, the RealPlayer music store gets a thumbs up for being easy to use and offering a flexible DRM policy. The new jukebox features let you make playlists, rip CDs, burn custom mixes, and listen to hundreds of online radio stations. The program still suffers from an intrusive installation, but file-type hijacking and upgrade harassment are mostly gone.

It does however use a colossal amount of recourses and suffer from memory leaks, bloated advertising, crashes and streaming problems. It has been reported to Stopbadware.org. It does, natively support RM file playback, but so does VLC.

VLC

Apart from its simplicity, what makes this player stand out is that it’s free, open source, and yet plays just about every format, proprietary or not without any problems. In fact, the interface is cleaner than that of Winamp, and it loads in less than a second. Program crashes are so rare that in my two years of use, it has crashed only once. Despite the simplicity and stability, VLC is also more feature rich than WMP in some cases. It doesn’t have much of a developed media library, but it shines in its advanced functions. Parts of the program, hidden away under certain dialog boxes, have preferences meant for the savviest computer guru. You can customise how the codec’s work, therefore optimizing their memory use. You can also configure your sound interfaces for your desired number of audio channels and quality.

Another killer feature is that this player can actually act as a media server and stream media to other players, including itself.

Final judgment

In conclusion, the best option would be to use two media players, both WMP and VLC. For playlists and party mixes, use WMP because its interface is streamlined for it, and for playing individual files or movies use VLC, as it is stable, loads quick and never requires a codec download.

Feature	Winner
Responsiveness	VLC, no other player comes close
Features	VLC, WMP, Winamp are all feature rich. The worst would be iTunes and QuickTime (because you have to pay).
Benign features (bad)	Winamp has too many useless features - people use Nero and other programs to burn stuff. Not Winamp.
Codec support	VLC, no other player comes close. If you can’t find a codec for WMP, just use VLC.