Why are media players so awful?

[Gornot]

It's exactly because of the shared .dlls that I take great care of the order in which I install software, lol

I guess it will... Oh, well, I still have my vinyls 8D

 

[Borg 386]

I've always made it a point to steer clear of Real Player, since my 1st experience with it on Win 98SE and I noticed how it "took over" everything on the PC, "phoned home" your preferences and when I removed it (Yes, even back then it was doing all that stuff). I found it left lots of deeply embedded files that I had to manually delete (This was before Revo Uninstaller).

Right now I use GOM to play certain files (vids mostly), and Media Player for others (music).

One note on GOM, it does phone home every time you play something. I found this during an investigation of open ports. Had to block that with the firewall.

I have been considering giving VLC a spin sometime.....something to do down the road...

 

[Gornot]

+1

And it certainly wouldn't hurt to try out VLC, since it can use internal codecs and save you the trouble of maintaining codec packs.

Besides, with Revo, now you can easily remove any allocations to VLC without problems.

 

[carwiz]

Any idea when VLC might get IR support?

I use WMC and like it. I think it has a great layout and well organized. It interfaces with my Hauppage 2250, Antec Veris Premier with iMON and an IR remote. It would be hard for me to move away from something that works so well.

 

[Gornot]

Not sure, I'm not exactly "up to speed" with development of VLC.

 

[Oaken]

Having never been a fan of combined players I prefer Xion for Music and Daum PotPlayer for video.

My music requirements are pretty basic as most of my digital files are original vinyl rips, beside my fav fully functional custom skin is a joy to use...

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There's a CD decks option too. Xion isn't ultra sophisticated though it does things the way I like them.

PotPlayer, on the other hand, is very sophisticated. Though is very comfortable for entry level users. Right down to the smallest detail, like auto-hiding the mouse once in fullscreen and user defined start/screen size. The latter is a big annoyance with VLC for me. Subtitles support is awesome and non hard-coded subs can be custom placed, and even moved to the black margin below the video itself. PotPlayer has tons of control and some serious features even for the most demanding users- if you haven't tried it you will be missing out.

 

[Gornot]

I remember trying out Xion a long time ago and thought to myself: yay, okay, it plays music... what else? uuuummmmm..... xD

DaumPot is, of course, good, because it's literally an advancement of KMPlayer. The project developer of KMP started DaumPot.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

With over 2000 cd's ripped in lossless MediaMonkey is the best I've found. Try it for free then if like get the Gold package and don't look back. itunes sucks ! Prior to the pre Yahoo take over of MusicMatch it was tops for ease of use but MediaMonkey has much greater flexibility with larger than the norm collections...highly suggest !

 

[Gornot]

Does MediaMonkey use FAAC or an actual AAC variation? The open source encoder is IMHO awful in a way that it's hard to set up, which is insane because aac is otherwise tons easier to manipulate than, say, LAME.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

By FAAC do you mean FLAC, if so then yes. Otherwise it's multiple file options only has your listed AAC not FAAC. Hope that helps.

 

[Gornot]

No, FLAC is a different kind of encoder, AAC is yet another.
But AAC, just like MP3, has multiple variations of the codec. The popular, open-source "mod" is LAME MP3 for MP3, and FAAC for AAC. That's what I was wondering about, if AAC support is based on the open-source FAAC and not, say, Nero's or Winamp's bundled encoder/decoder...

 

[noobvious]

Does MediaMonkey use FAAC or an actual AAC variation? The open source encoder is IMHO awful in a way that it's hard to set up, which is insane because aac is otherwise tons easier to manipulate than, say, LAME.

I have mediamonkey Gold. It plays M4A natively, but doesn't record or convert to it. However, on their info pageMediaMonkey » Information » Free, it says a converter can be added....and that link takes you to http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ .
I've never explored that myself, as I rip CD's to FLAC and make LAME VBR conversions for use on my portable players.

 

[Gornot]

Ugh. Thanks for the info in any case