Why are media players so awful?

severedsolo said:

Windows users are always complaining about iTunes

Thats because Itunes is the most god awful piece of software known to man. You know how every other media player, all you have to do is point it to your music library and it figures it out? Well Itunes doesn't like that, it has to create its own special folder, so you have the same Music twice....

It asks you if you want this feature when you install it. Did you miss that?

Frankly, I like WMP12 it does what I want it to do. WMP10 caused me no end of issues, I think i can think of about 5 files (out of 2000 odd media files that I have) which WMP12 won't play. For those I use VLC.

I get what you mean about the controls though, they are a bit all over the shop. This is why I always just use the "Alt" key, basically everything you want is in those 5 little dropdown menus. I dont know why Microsoft think that "File Edit etc." offends our eyes so much and insists on hiding them away. This is my main gripe with MS Office too. The Ribbon just makes no sense to me at all.

You sound like a grump old man. LOL.

When it doubt, VLC it!

lehnerus2000 said:

What are your favourite media players?

For just listening to my music on the computer, foobar2000 with the foobar2000: Components Repository - WASAPI output support component installed.

For aggregating my podcasts, and managing my MP3 players' content, I'm a long-time MediaMonkey » Free Media Jukebox, Music Manager, CD Ripper & Converter user. I have the upgraded Gold version, but most people can get by with the free version just fine....I certainly did for quite a while.

For videos, I just use WMP12. I did try VLC for a little while, but for whatever reason, it was using 10% more CPU than WMP12 was, so I went back to WMP12. With Shark007.net - Windows 7 Codecs - WMP12 Codecs installed, WMP12 will play pretty much anything.

I just installed Zune and I'll have to agree with the Mac users on this subject.
Luckily I used a VM!

The installer is awful:

• It doesn't say where it is installing the files to (the 1st time it dumped all of its files directly into the "Program Files" folder).
• I didn't notice an option to disable the desktop icon.

First Impressions weren't promising:

• It played an annoying intro ad/startup sequence.
• It was using ~30% CPU (Winamp in the same VM uses <1%).
• There didn't seem to be an obvious way to kill the "visualisation" (related to the previous point).

It's other "helpful" features are just like the other MS media players:

• It "helpfully" modified the "Libraries".
• It created a "Podcast" entry (I never use podcasts and there's no way to stop it).
• It seems like all of its options are always on (you can't disable anything).
• The interface has tiny text. How could anyone read that on a portable device?
• It couldn't find ~1300 video files, despite being told where to look (it found ~50 other files on that same drive though).

It demonstrates that:

• MS thinks users are too stupid to be able to make their own decisions.
• MS always knows best (at least that's what they believe).

Despite its minor annoyances, Winamp seems to be the media player I'll have to use on Windows 7.

Lost Colonist said:

Hm, I use Winamp for audio and BSPlayer for video files (.MKV / etc.) I switched WMP 12 out because it had a more limited file playback range.

The Shark007.net - Windows 7 Codecs - WMP12 Codecs package solved that for me. WMP12 has played everything I've tried to play on it, audio or video. I only use it for video though.

Any advice on .rmvb (video) players? I generally use VLC for videos but it doesn't smoothly playback certain formats. I avoid WMP; absolutely loathe the auto-switch-to-library-interface thing it does when you stick a USB drive in your machine. Media Player Classic sounded like what I was looking for but apparently it wants codecs, and we all know doing that isn't as simple as grabbing a nice standardized package somewhere and I'm not in the mood to chase down version numbers or names right now.

The good thing about standards is that there's so many of them to choose from.
/sarc

Trucidation said:

Any advice on .rmvb (video) players? I generally use VLC for videos but it doesn't smoothly playback certain formats. I avoid WMP; absolutely loathe the auto-switch-to-library-interface thing it does when you stick a USB drive in your machine. Media Player Classic sounded like what I was looking for but apparently it wants codecs, and we all know doing that isn't as simple as grabbing a nice standardized package somewhere and I'm not in the mood to chase down version numbers or names right now.

The good thing about standards is that there's so many of them to choose from.
/sarc

lol .RMVB. I forgot that format even existed :P

Trucidation said:

Any advice on .rmvb (video) players? I generally use VLC for videos but it doesn't smoothly playback certain formats. I avoid WMP; absolutely loathe the auto-switch-to-library-interface thing it does when you stick a USB drive in your machine. Media Player Classic sounded like what I was looking for but apparently it wants codecs, and we all know doing that isn't as simple as grabbing a nice standardized package somewhere and I'm not in the mood to chase down version numbers or names right now.

The good thing about standards is that there's so many of them to choose from.
/sarc

After 8 months I have finally got MPC to play rmvb audio again.
Real Player was preventing MPC (& K-Lite Mega Codec Pack) from installing properly.

You may have to get some dlls from another source also.
I haven't confirmed if I needed to install extra dlls (they were already present from my experiments during the day).

For the steps I used, see this post:
https://www.sevenforums.com/1151048-post6.html

Now I can go back to using MPC for all of my videos.

jelyman said:

lol .RMVB. I forgot that format even existed :P

A lot of anime episodes are in rmvb format.