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Official players - What is the big deal?

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f0dder:
I don't install the alternatives either - if http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ can't play it, I ignore it.

lanux128:
good to hear that "Media Player Classic" has life after Gabest. :up:

J-Mac:
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?
-Josh (March 15, 2009, 04:04 PM)
--- End quote ---

A brief report on RealPlayer at StopBadware.com. RealPlayer is still installing adware and silently installs the Rhapsody Player Engine software and does not remove it when you uninstall RealPlayer. The adware is in the form of their "Message Center" popup junk which they describe on their Terms & Conditions page as a software update process. Ha!

And anyone around as long as me surely remembers - and not fondly - the original RealAudio Player, Real Jukebox, and RealPlayer G2. PC Mag a couple years ago listed RealPlayer 1.0 (1999 version) as the #2 item on its Worst Products of All-Time report, and all RealPlayer versions from 1996 - 2004 collectively as the #5 item on that same report.

I remember that once you installed the original version you could NOT remove the damn thing - it was a monster! You could try to manually clean out the registry, like I did, and eventually reinstall the OS because of it. It was one of the worst programs I have ever installed.

Jim

darklight_tr:
I use The KMPlayer, which is a great free media player for Windows.  It can play almost anything!

MrCrispy:
Shark codec pack (shark007.net) + KmPlayer is all you need for every possible type of media.

There are other solutions (MPC-hc, VLC, Gomplayer, good old WMP), as well as manually installing codecs (ffdshow + QT and Real alternative is all you need in 99% of the cases), but none are as easy to use and no player approaches the beautiful UI and extreme customizability of Kmplayer!

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