media player redux

[ThirdMan]

Re: iFilm or Atom Films, or any online video. On Windows you have to keep three, or at least two, media players installed: QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer. Their always claiming file types from each other. It sucks.

--ThirdMan

[ryanpaige]

Everyone should just go to QuickTime and be done with it.

[spudracer]

Its kinda like the war between browsers. Netscape does certain things IE doesn't. It's a pain yes, but you have to have just about every video player out there to watch anything off of the internet now.

Welcome aboard ThirdMan, hope to see lots of posts from you in the future! :)

[movieweasel]

I know what you mean.

Quicktime works pretty well, and plays most stuff, but a lot of sites are set up Window Media
so you pretty much have to have both.

RealPlayer I don't see as having a long life. I think it's going down the tubes. I don't even keep
updates of that one anymore.

I use Rabbit, so I don't have to figure out which player to use.

--MovieWeasel

[ThirdMan]

Re: just use QuickTime. Would it were so, but the Microsoft Marketing Machine has made headway in the face of QT's technical superiority. Also, QT doesn't play mpeg, does it?

Re: Like IE and Netscape. Yeah, it's true, but what's life if you can't complain? :) I like complaining.

Re: 'Rabbit'. What the *&^% is that?

--ThirdMan

[ryanpaige]

I meant that the people offering the content should just put everything in QuickTime and be done with it. I know that we consumers don't get to make those choices ourselves.

[movieweasel]

>>Also, QT doesn't play mpeg, does it?

QuickTime plays mpeg just fine, but it often has problems with avi.

>>'Rabbit'. What the *&^% is that?

Rabbit's a media player that plays clips using QT or WMP in the background.
Saves me the trouble of figuring out which to run.

[OG-]

It doesn't really matter to me, I just use old school mplayer for mpeg and avi, and quicktime for .mov. I don't bother to download anything if its real media because real player is the worst format ever made.

[ThirdMan]

Microsoft has spiffed media publishers to use it's products -
- it's using it's riches to fund it's media publishing
effort, operating at a loss to drive others out of business.
That's why Darwin (Apple's media server) is free -- Apple's
the only other company that can do that. See, neither of
them are *really* in the media publishing business. They're
in the 'control the user' business.


Quictime is better than mpeg, but *publishing* Quicktime is
costly. There are tons of free tools for publishing mpeg,
which is why (imo) mpeg is so popular in the porn biz.


Re: Rabbit. You should have told me it was http://www.getrabbit.com
instead of plain old rabbit.com. It took me a while to find
it. I'm also surprised I don't know about it -- I'm usually
the first to know about online video stuff. It *is* a beta
product, though...

I like the mpeg and qt playback. I like the skins. The slot
is weird. More feedback later.

--ThirdMan

[movieweasel]

Sorry ThirdMan. Didn't think to drop in the url.

Yeah, Rabbit's a beta. It works pretty well, but there are a few features that
don't seem to function yet. I think it's only been out a few weeks. I've just
been using it to search for trailers and short films, then play them.

I agree with you about Microsoft, but what are we going to do about it?

[ThirdMan]

What are we going to do about it? Nothing, that's what. Use
the least ms software we can, and kvetch a lot...

--ThirdMan

[Yoda]

QuickTime is almost always the best. You can fastforward, go in slow motion, or go frame by frame. The frame by frame thing is awesome for particularly "valuable" trailers. Imagine watching the LOTR trailer in QuickTime! You could get a good look at all of those various shots.

Anyway, Windows Media Player is okay, too. It's major benefit is that I usually find more clips in that format than in QuickTime. RealPlayer has them all beat in number of clips, though (I think).

[movieweasel]

I agree, TWT...QuickTime is usually best, but then there's so much that runs only in WMP.

I've been using Rabbit now for a couple weeks, and it's working great. I've been letting it find trailers and download them for me.

Unfortunately, I can only run it on my PC. It doesn't work on my Mac. Maybe they'll put out a Mac version.

-MovieWeasel