what is the best out and out media player

[Dinesh]

I use VLC. It can play almost anything... even your drums.

 

[Tews]

I use VLC. It can play almost anything... even your drums.

Yeah, but can it whistle Dixie???

 

[Dinesh]

I use VLC. It can play almost anything... even your drums.

Yeah, but can it whistle Dixie???

never tried it.

 

[Mercurial]

windows 7 mediaplayer/center + shark007 codecs

 

[jimbo45]

VLC for those huge mkv files (High Definition Anyone?)
Windows media player for your average avi file
winamp for music
real player for those pesky rmvb and rmb files

anything else worth mentioning?

I rate VLC as the best hands down as it can play just about anything!

Hi there

VLC is good but it's purely a player - not really good as a Library manager etc.

Winamp works fine and has decent Library facilities and can play FLAC directly - I use FLAC mainly for audio as I don't like hideously compressed lossy mp3 files -- computers have TERABYTES of cheap storage these days - why compress your music to lossy files when you can use something like FLAC to keep them LOSSLESSLY compressed -- you really hear the difference when playing into decent equipment. No artifacts etc etc.

By all means compress to mp3 when loading into Ipods etc but on the computer you don't need to use LOSSY compression any more -- Disk space is CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

BTW

How do I get rid of the stupid Real player messenger popup every time I boot -- these type of apps are REALLY ANNOYING. The actual real player itself is OK but I hate the pesky popup.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[QuackPot]

I uses:

gom player
Divx
bink tools

and a few other third party software.

 

[Teerex]

I like JetAudio.

Me too. I bought the full version, it's the only media player I ever spent money on.
Didn't regret it.

 

[Antman]

I like JetAudio.

Me too. I bought the full version, it's the only media player I ever spent money on.
Didn't regret it.

SF members should give it a go. I found it several years ago when reading various player reviews - looking at playback quality only. To my amazement, it is a remarkable video player as well.

 

[Joshatdot]

For years I used MPC-HC from k-lite codecpack, and after reading some here I switched to MPC-HC x64 and k-lite codec pack x64.

Oh yeah, I use foobar for audio.

 

[macgyver2]

I love Jet Audio, it was the first program I ever used besides the WM built in stuff. It always played DVD's better then anything when it came to getting great sound on a laptop or cheap speakers.

 

[belveder]

I've always sworn by KMPlayer although have tried VLC & MPC, but the other day I tried out watching an avi with ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre and wow the picture difference was huge over the others for colour quality

 

[Martin]

VLC for video
AIMP /Winamp for audio

 

[harpua]

Just tried Arcsoft TMT and did not find any significant improvement over what I get from properly configured MPC-HC plus I vastly prefer the MPC interface. I compared the same AVI file in both players. Seemed almost identical video image quality to me. I really couldn't say one was better than the other in terms of picture quality, imo. I'm watching on a 24" 1920 x 1080 LCD monitor.

So for me, no compelling reason to spend money on a media player.

 

[ElQuia]

JRiver Media Center 14 for music (its the best ofr quality and managing tagging and big colletions) and for video its nice.

MPC Home Cinema for quick video viewing and not so common formats

Cyberlink Power DVD for DVD and HD Video. The quality is awesome.

Got them all working OK on Win7 x64 b7600

 

[Eloora]

I've resigned myself to using iTunes as my main music player now, mostly because I like listening to a lot of podcasts. Before I used Winamp a lot, but I've tried most others as well.

 

[JoHn87]

KM Player with CoreAVC = perfect

 

[bing90]

I like:

Windows Media Player, to me it is perfect.

 

[Teerex]

I love Jet Audio, it was the first program I ever used besides the WM built in stuff. It always played DVD's better then anything when it came to getting great sound on a laptop or cheap speakers.

Notice how JetAudio seems to be one of tha rare (only?) players whose video window behaves like Windows Media Player when it's minimized - the video keeps playing down there and it can be Aero Peeked.

 

[McZook]

Audio: +1 vote for MediaMonkey - awesome DB tools for large music collections!

Video: I rarely watch movies, but I will have to give Shark007's codec pack a try.

 

[harpua]

I just switched (hopefully temporarily) from using (for video) MPC-HC x64 w. AC3 Filter, to MPC-HC x86 with Shark's W7 codecs, + CoreAVC Pro + AC3 Filter and am greatly enjoying how easy it now is to tweak things so I can play various files types with the filters/codecs that work best for me. Very impressed with Sharks settings tool. Makes a complex thing much easier to deal with (and tweak). And CoreAVC Pro seems pretty awesome for the H264 stuff. Looking forward to when they release their x64 version so I can go back to using MPC-HC x64.