EARLIER FEATURES
FEATURES CONTENTS
LATER FEATURES
|
|
|
|
| 9th July 2006 | MEDIA PLAYERS |
Brian Grainger |
|
In an earlier article about Standards in general I mentioned that there existed media players for Windows, other than Windows Media Player, that would play Microsoft media formats. This is provided no Digital Rights Management security has been added. This article is about such alternative players and my search for a no-nonsense alternative to the Microsoft offering. I have used two versions of Windows Media Player, (WMP), on my PCs. On my desktop I use WMP version 7, which I think is the highest version usable with Windows 98. I have downloaded the codecs from the Microsoft site to play up to WMV version 9. On my desktop at work I use WMP version 10. I must say I find this version a bit of an irritation, because its interface is so unlike any normal Windows program. I know it is there, but I have great difficulty in locating the standard menus in the default skin. This seems a bit ridiculous when it is ingrained now that the menu bar should be the first row below the Application Window Title. I started looking for alternatives to WMP when I found some files would not play on my Windows 98 desktop. Eventually, I got to play most WMV formats by downloading the codecs, something I was wary of doing because Microsoft give no clue as to the size of the download and this is very important to me with my dialup Internet access. Nevertheless I still sometimes find other formats that WMP7 will not play. Files in AVI format, which always used to play in my early PC days, seem to fail to play with WMP quite often now. Similarly, some of the newer MP4 formats do not play properly on WMP10. I could not understand why some AVI files would play and others would not. I took to searching around for information on codecs and it was then that I realised there was a difference between a codec and a container format. A codec is the actual coding/decoding scheme used to translate the audio or video into digital bits and vice versa. A container format is a scheme for holding media files together. This is somewhat akin to a how files are compressed for transmission across the internet. When a file is zipped it uses a compression 'codec' such as LZW to compress the file. However, multiple files can be compressed and zipped up into a library so that they can be transmitted as a single file. In this sense, the zip format could be regarded as a container format. Similarly in the open source world files are often transmitted in tar.gz format. The gz is the 'codec' compression part and the tar is the container format. An AVI is a container format, as is the Apple Quicktime MOV format. On the other hand, WMV version 9 is a video codec and WMA Version 7 is an audio codec. These may be wrapped up in a WMV container format. For those AVI files that worked with WMP then the codecs used must have been part of the WMP package. However, as AVI is a container format there is no guarantee that the same codecs would be used in different AVI files. Clearly some AVI files used codecs that were NOT part of the WMP package. How very confusing. As far as I was concerned I just wanted a media player that would play anything I shoved at it! Another thing to bear in mind is that WMP will play Audio CDs and DVDs. It would be good if my new choice of Media Player would do that as well. For many years the alternative media player toted by the magazines has been WinAmp. I have never used this program and doing a quick check for this article I find things that would not recommend it to me.
Let us consider the things I have looked at. I have in my quest looked at the following products:
Media Player Classic was a washout. It failed on installation with an error message that left me none the wiser. VLC is quite nice, but the documentation reads very complicated. I originally looked at it as a tool to save video streams from the Internet for offline viewing. It will do this, but I have not got round to doing it yet. Put off by the complexity! The other three are all related. MPlayer is the father project. It is a media player that is open source and distributed under the GNU 2 licence. It is written in Hungary by a true Unix/Linux aficionado. It does just about anything, runs on multiple operating systems, but only runs from the command prompt on Windows! I know I like DOS and the command prompt, but I am not one of those masochists who will ONLY use the command prompt. I've got nothing against GUIs when they do what I want! WinMPlayer and MPUI are two different programs that add a GUI interface to MPlayer. WinMPlayer requires an installation routine and also requires the use of additional files to deal with certain codecs. MPUI, on the other hand, is FAB (Free, Acceptably Behaved) software. While it comes as an installation package it also comes as a zip file. Unzip to a directory of choice and installation is complete. The program consists of a customised binary image of MPlayer as an .exe file together with the MPUI.exe GUI wrapper. The basic MPlayer comes with additional separate codec files, that unlike WMP do not have to be installed. This makes it very flexible. MPUI gives up this flexibility for the simplicity of a single MPlayer.exe file. It works for me. The files I need to play work. It copes with Quicktime MOV files and all the MPG and WMV files I feed it also play. On the audio codec front it copes with the open source favourite, .ogg, which is something that WMP will not do. On the downside, whenever you try to play a file on Windows 98 MPUI will complain that it does not work properly on Windows 98. It does give the option to continue and it works for me when I do, although maybe not with full functionality! A more obvious problem is that it does not appear to play Audio CDs on Windows 98 or Windows XP and it only plays DVD on Windows XP. MPUI has a very simple interface, which is just as well as there is no help file to speak of. The help file consists of keyboard shortcuts for the MPUI functions. The file menu has 3 options. Play File; Play URL; Play CD/DVD. It does not get much simpler than that. The first two options open a dialog box to point to the file or URL. The last option lists your CD/DVD drives. The View menu has the usual options of display sizes along with a full screen mode. The Play menu has the usual stop, pause, next and previous track as well as the somewhat unique forward and rewind options of 10 seconds, 1 minute and 10 minutes. You can also play from a Playlist. The Tools menu contains some interesting options, such as deinterlacing and changing the aspect ratio. For full control there is also the possibility of sending MPlayer parameters as if you were typing them from the command line. MPUI is not perfect, especially on the Windows 98 platform, but its usefulness in turning MPlayer into a usable media player for the non-geek, that can play more formats than WMP, makes it 'must have' software for me. Before I finish I do want to give honourable mentions to MPlayer itself and VLC. MPlayer is the ultimate cross platform media player, with every option you could think of. While the Linux distros I use at the moment do not include MPlayer as standard, I think they should. There is one Linux Live CD, Limp, which is designed solely to play multimedia and it is built upon MPlayer. Part of the MPlayer package is a sister program, Mencoder, that can be used to translate files between different codecs. Mencoder can also be used to create offline copies of streamed media. VLC, while being complex in its instructions, will also be part of my software armoury. The basic GUI is just that, basic, but simple to use. However, VLC is very powerful, if you can understand how to use it. It too is released under the GNU 2 licence and does not seem to have problems with playing Audio CDs or DVDs. Indeed, as VLC includes the routines from DVDJon to enable the playing of region encoded DVDs, (provided your DVD drive does not include firmware that does a region check), it will probably play more DVDs than your average DVD Player. VLC can also work in conjunction with TV cards - so it should be possible to record TV with it. VLC is a powerful program - just a little too powerful if all you want is a Windows Media Player replacement! Links
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
