[milkweg]

What's good about VLC is not its quality but its ability to play formats that many other players can't. I had to use VLC at one time to be able play DVDs passed though to my HDTV when upscaled to higher res than DVD res. That was due to the wonderful HDCP at work and blocking me from playing HD res on my HDTV. VLC to the rescue.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by milkweg /img/forum/go_quote.gif What's good about VLC is not its quality but its ability to play formats that many other players can't.

Agreed!
VLC is far from stable (crash a lot), but at least it play almost anything you throw at it.

 

[m3guy]

I went through this thread and it seems most of these players are for windows. Any recommendations for OSX? (Not VLC please) Thanx.

 

[MaZa]

Media Player Classic Home Cinema + ffdshow decoder = win. Small program that isnt a resource hog, much like foobar, and ffdshow offers great picture enhancing possibilities. And some small codec pack for videos that ffdshow cant handle. (it can handle most, but some have to be enabled by hand and some of them are buggy)

VLC is good for playing those obscure videos if the video doesnt play on MPC for some reason or another.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by m3guy /img/forum/go_quote.gif Any recommendations for OSX? (Not VLC please) Thanx.

QuickTime Player + Perian + Flip4Mac cover 99% of my needs. Worth a try!

 

[warbaque]

As stated above
Media Player Classic Home Cinema + ffdshow decoder (+ quicktime alternative)

 

[twylight]

CCCP - I have used it since xp32 thru windows 7 64 - it simply owns and plays everything - 5 or 6 mb download, updated frequently

 

[Zorander]

Slightly off-topic: I'm trying out Ubuntu and would like to know what's a good choice for audio and video players for it. I like light, minimalistic programs like Foobar2K and MPC(-HC).

Thanks.

 

[milkweg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by twylight /img/forum/go_quote.gif CCCP - I have used it since xp32 thru windows 7 64 - it simply owns and plays everything - 5 or 6 mb download, updated frequently

I've never used that codec pack but try to stay away from them because they can cause issues in games when they try to play the opening movies.
Many people have had their system messed up by codec packs.

 

[Vayate]

I use MPC homecinema and CCCP as well. The CCCP package is outdated though, and you may want to update ffdshow and MPC after installing it. I mainly use the install package for the configurator. Everything looks good, homecinema has no tearing in XP and is reasonably robust in terms of features, and ffdshow can use the full dynamic range with high quality RGB conversion (a huge plus if you don't have an video card where you can set full dynamic range in the drivers). Pretty nice package on the whole.

A media player is only as good as its codecs. VLC's codecs tend to wash out color and it has terrible seek support. To its credit they did fix the subtitles as of version 9, but it has a lot of catching up to do to be anywhere near the other available players in terms of quality and usability. It's a good backup player though, since if you don't have codecs it will play the video/audio by brute force.