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Official players - What is the big deal?

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Josh:
I have a question for everyone. Ever since getting my wife her laptop for school, I have come to the realization that most of these OFFICIAL media players for various formats are very wildly over-attacked for their abilities. For example, quicktime and real player. My biggest gripe with real player was from back in the day when it used to startup several programs and alert me with these advertisements. Given the recent trend, they have seriously cleaned up their act. I have no problems with them at all now. The same goes for quicktime. I installed it and after disabling the apple software update service, I had no problems with it. The players are really well thought out and function great. They have seemless integration with various web browsers and serve their purpose. Now, I do not use any of them as a default player for my various media files, I use KMPlayer for that, but I do rely on their players for browser-based playback. Heck, real and apple have both included ways for me to save various media files without having to resort to rippers such as streambox.

Now, that said, I have tried the alternatives such as "Real alternative" and QTLite. Both are OK, but both have caused me to have to reinstall them because some component became unregistered in my system or just wasn't playing right after a browser update or other software update. The default official players, however, have never failed since my recent experiment over the last few months. This leads me to the question, are these players as horrid as they once were to most? Or is it the old "They started out evil and will remain so" reputation that most larger corporations get?

Comments? Questions? Concerns?

app103:
I think people would love to have their favorite media player to be capable of playing all formats, and when it can't and the need to install something else arises, no matter what it is or how good it is, since they really don't want that, they will hate that additional software they have to install, rather than directing their focus on the real problem, and that is that their player of choice is falling short by not supporting these additional formats.

Yes, I know that's an enormous run-on sentence. :-[

Deozaan:
I just hate Real because back when I did anything with it, it really sucked. I haven't given it a second chance because I don't think it deserves one.

I hate Quicktime because, back when I did anything with it, it really sucked. I have given it second and third and fourth, etc., chances and every time it still sucks because it bundles extra crap with it or whatever. It sucks.

I tried Real, it sucked. I tried Quicktime, it sucked. I'm perfectly happy with the alternatives I use so why should I give a crappy product another try?

Josh:
I am not saying make any of these your DEFAULT player, I am saying why go through all of the other hoops just to get another player to play them? I rarely find a video, unless it's on a video developer (I.E., the old AlienSong video) where they use quicktime for the size of file it produces relative to the quality achieved. As I said, when the alternatives worked for browser-based media, they did ok but often times resulted in various problems.

Lashiec:
QuickTime still isn't a competing player IMO, due to its long load time, and some glaring omissions (by heaven's sake, it's the 21st century, and STILL does not have a playlist). But it's a well-behaved citizen, unlike previous versions, and asks you during the installation phase if you want the various integration thingies it'll bring with it, unlike iTunes.

It also works nicely with 3rd party players (MPC-HC in my case), so I rarely have to use it, save for the rare video that mess with its native resolution.

RealPlayer, in the other hand, it's a player I'm not touching with even a 10-foot pole, not to mention I don't have any need for it, as I don't recall encountering Real streams or files in a while.

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