Comparison of different media players

[ernstblaauw]

First an explanation: I started this thread, because I want to know the differences between media players. I do not want to start a topic, waiting at replies like: I like Media Player Classic because it has such a nice colors, or: ZoomPlayer is the best!

I want to compare the features of the different media players (MPC, BSplayer, ZoomPlayer, etc), like: Which player can handle Matroska the best? Which player crashes too often, because of it's own buggy code? Which player can handle RealOne & QuickTime? And which media player fixes its bugs fast? (for example: every week a new version of MPC is released, so that's very good. BSplayer's last update is from november...)

I hope we can find out which player is the most "allround" player. I hope this is not a violation of rule 12! I just want to compare them, and I understand every player has strong and weak sides.

[KpeX]

Originally posted by ernstblaauw
I hope this is not a violation of rule 12! I just want to compare them, and I understand every player has strong and weak sides. It's fairly close ;). The problem is you when you ask for all differences you bring opinion into the question, and media player choice is very much about one's opinion.

To me media players break down into two large groups: DirectShow based players and non-directshow based. Most media players common for video are DShow players, such as BSPlayer, Zoom Player, MPC, WMP, TCMP, etc. In general the performance of directshow players is greatly based on your choice of filters registered. Some players like MPC, however, are becoming crossover players because they have many built in filters.

IMO there is not one media player that serves all needs, in my case I have 4-5 media players on my HD at any time. For audio Winamp is the choice for its appearance, excellent interface and media library that are great for DJ-like tasks. I've been using Foobar2k a lot recently, however, it is a very lightweight player with tons of utilities for tagging and conversion.

For video purposes Media Player Classic is probably my most commonly used player, it is lightweight and loads fast on my box, has tons of built in filters for DVD playback and new formats like Matroska, and supports RealMedia and Quicktime. VLC (http://www.videolan.org) is also a very promising player IMO, it's open source, non directshow based, and supports a very large number of formats. I'm surprised that VLC doesn't get very much attention, it's an excellent player.