Good do-it-all media player?

[Philbob]

Hi

After doing what turned out to be a completely unnecessary reinstall of Vista to fix what turned out to be a very simple hardware issue, I've come to reinstalling all my software.

I previously had a huge mess of different media players for doing all sorts of different things, including:

Winamp (for music playback)
Windows Media Player (for most videos)
iTunes (for syncing with my iPod, and CD ripping)
Quicktime (for mov files, mostly stuff embedded in web pages)
Real Alternative (for internet radio sites that use Real streams, mostly the BBC)
Windows Media Center (for DVDs and TV, although I'll probably end up keeping this as it does TV very well)

Plus the DivX plugin that seemed to bundle in its own player which I never used.

What I'm ideally after is a program (will settle for a couple if necessary) that will do all the stuff that all the others do, and won't feel the need to start up various processes at boot up, and even when you disable them, re-enable themselves whenever you use the program (heres looking at you, iTunes). Does something like this exist?

 

[dagwoood]

You could try VLC Media player, it plays all the popular video/audio formats straight out of the box; no need to install any additional codecs.

 

[Mundu]

VLC does everything I need. Never had any codec problems since I changed over from WMP and codec packs and is a nice DVD player too.

 

[Zefan]

Keep winamp for music, it rocks.

VLC for everything else.

 

[Dingleberry88]

Keep winamp for music, it rocks.

VLC for everything else.

+ Media Player Classic & CoreAVC Codec for HD.

 

[martin9887]

Could look into Foober2000 for playing music, I found it a lot better over Winamp, quality wise and it's not bloated like Winamp is, in my opinion.

 

[badbob]

Replace Quicktime with Quicktime Alternative. Your system shouldn't be borked, that's how I've got mine (minus itunes) and Media Centre.

 

[yantorsen]

what's wrong with WMP?

 

[Zefan]

what's wrong with WMP?

It's an abomination!

 

[marc2003]

what's wrong with WMP?

it sucks. if i have it minimised with music playing, i do anything cpu intensive and the sound skips. it's not a soundcard driver problem as no other program does it. also it's nasty the way it tries to overwrite my perfectly tagged mp3 collection (and adds super hidden album art, which is usually wrong, to all my music folders)

foobar > * for music.

and MPC for video (with ffdshow, QT/real alternative) = win.

 

[Arjun806]

Keep winamp for music, it rocks.

VLC for everything else.

+1

Best combination I've found.

 

[yantorsen]

It's an abomination!

it sucks. if i have it minimised with music playing, i do anything cpu intensive and the sound skips. it's not a soundcard driver problem as no other program does it. also it's nasty the way it tries to overwrite my perfectly tagged mp3 collection (and adds super hidden album art, which is usually wrong, to all my music folders)

foobar > * for music.

and MPC for video (with ffdshow, QT/real alternative) = win.

It works fine for me

 

[badbob]

Prefer Winamp for music.
WMP for Videos.

Media Portal for HTPC use

 

[bledd]

winamp lite for music
media player classic & ffdshow & quicktime alternative for video

 

[Philbob]

Thanks all.

I'm trying VLC, and while it works great with files on my PC, I'm having a few issues getting it to work with Opera. Opera detected the plugin first time round, but when I went to watch some movie trailers on Apple's site to test it out, it crashed. Tried reinstalling both apps, and now it won't detect the plugin. Copying npvlc.dll into Operas plugin directory (as suggestedd here) hasn't worked either. Any ideas on how to sort that?

 

[Dingleberry88]

^^Install QuickTime/QuickTime Alternative.

 

[Eriedor]

it sucks. if i have it minimised with music playing, i do anything cpu intensive and the sound skips. it's not a soundcard driver problem as no other program does it. also it's nasty the way it tries to overwrite my perfectly tagged mp3 collection (and adds super hidden album art, which is usually wrong, to all my music folders)

foobar > * for music.

and MPC for video (with ffdshow, QT/real alternative) = win.

I've simply turned off the automatic writing of tags, never get sound skip and does the job for me.

The manual tagging in it is excellent as well, better than any 3rd party software I've used.

 

[LeperousDust]

The manual tagging in it is excellent as well, better than any 3rd party software I've used.

You obviously haven't used MusicBrainz Picard then...

VLC (and/or) MPC for all video
Foobar as default music player
iTunes for music dukebox (i want to hate it and its bloated but as dukeboxs go everyone knows how to use it, it syncs with my iPod and scrobbles everything i play on my ipod and itunes to last.fm, so its a necessary evil )

 

[marc2003]

I've simply turned off the automatic writing of tags

well obviously i do that now. but the first time i tried it i didn't realise it was going to mess with them.... it made a right mess of my files. luckily i just restored them from a backup.

edit: and it can't display various artist albums properly or support cue sheets. (even if the sound didn't skip )

 

[v0n]

Media Player Classic is brilliant. VLC is great but the interface is just too clonky. MPC does everything including screenshots and subtitling in regular intuitive interface like original WMP. Stuff works just like it should if you're creature of habit - space pauses, arrow keys control volume and steps etc...