This time around I’m going to do something a bit different. We wanted to do a review on a media player, but how to choose which one? I’m a VLC man, myself, but I do use an old version of Winamp for listening to mp3’s because I like the playlist interface and the windowshade mode. So what the hell, we’ll do them all. OK, not really. There’s too dang many media players out there, and I don’t think Steven would permit me to take over his blog for the amount of time that would take anyway.

Here are the players I’ve decided to tear up check out, in no particular order. I’m staying with programs that can be acquired for free.

Windows Media Player from Microsoft

VLC from Videolan.org.

Quintessential player from Quinnware, a.k.a. ‘QCD’.

Foobar2000 developed by Peter Pawlowski

XMplay from unseen developments.

I will be examining these in turn on several points: acquisition and installation, interface and features and system “friendliness” in two parts.

Acquisition and Installation

Windows Media Player, A.K.A. “WiMP”: The 25 meg filesize puts a railroad spike in the coffin for a dialup user, but thankfully, the player can be downloaded outside Windows Update so I hope you have friends with thumb drives. The latest version is 11, with apparently separate builds for Vista and XP. Good thing, what with the building backlash against Vista. The Windows Live installer take care of tucking this player into your system. The installer offers you a number of other sub-applications such as Photo Gallery and Windows Live Toolbar. If you’re not interested, these can be unchecked easily enough, just don’t rush through the install.

VLC is released under a GPL or General Public License. Click the link for more info on how this differs from normal freeware, however, it won’t affect most of us. It’s free. The latest ver is v 0.8.6.C, with a just over 9 meg download for the Windows version. VLC is available for over 20 operating systems, including Mac, BeOs, Solaris, *BSD and many flavors of *nix. If you don’t find your OS available, you can grab the source code and do it yourself! Upon running the installer, VLC prompts you to choose from about a dozen common languages, then offers you choices about file type associations and desktop shortcuts. The default selections are well thought-out, most users can skate right through.

QCD or Quintessential Player is currently in version 4.51 with a surprisingly small 2.4 meg download package. QCD is only available in English, but like VLC, it gives you several options for installation, and again, the default selections are quite sufficient for the casual user. QCD requests a reboot at the close of installation.

Foobar2000, currently ver 0.9.4.5, is a small 1.6 megs on the download. The installer offers several options, like the others, such as a built-in album manager, audio CD playback support and ‘per user’ settings, which is a definite plus. Everyone has their preferences, and Foobar happily caters to you, and anyone else who uses the same machine.

XMplay is offered in version 3.4.2.1, with a tiny 300k package. There is no installation. You just unzip it wherever you want and go. This could be a problem for the computer-illiterate, who may not know how or where to unzip it, or which file to click to make it go. (Thank you oh-so-much Microsoft, for the ‘hide file extentions’ default setting.) Upon running XMplayer for the first time, a popup window gives you several tips, one of which is “RTFM“. Gotta respect that, man.

Interface and Features

First off, according to a couple audiophiles I spoke with, despite anyone’s player prefs, the actual playback has more to do with your machine’s sound card and the speakers you stick to it in most cases. Therefore, I’ll be looking more at ease of use and features than sound quality. All players produced, to my ears, the same sounds as the others. Unless you’re doing some advanced audio sampling, any difference you hear between decent players is just a placebo effect, so I’m told.

WiMP ticked me off from the start. Upon being run for the first time, it informed me that my copy of Windows was pirated(it’s not, came with the machine, OEM), then crashed, complained of a conflict and suggested I reinstall and reboot. I did so, and things went better after that. The compact mode is too light on controls, and the full mode was not intuitive to me. I found myself quickly getting frustrated with trying to figure out how to do things. I didn’t have to pretend to be unfamiliar with the interface, as I have rarely used WiMP. There seemed to me to be an unnecessary abundance of features that a person wanting a media player would never have a use for, like a cd-burning sub-app that I could not get to work, and a portable device synch’er that worked, but dragging and dropping from an explorer window is faster and easier, IMHO. However, the library function is very useful, and was quite adept at organizing my collection of ripped CD’s (over a hundred albums, all bought commercially, STFU RIAA). The skin mode was much more to my liking, having less than a dozen buttons with the usual play, stop etc, as well as quicklinks to the playlist and equalizer. WiMP has a wide variety of plug-ins and cool skins to choose from as well, including an XBox360-themed skin! As far as video goes, I like the full screen option with the console that pops up when you mouse to the bottom of the screen…VERY handy. However, as expected, WiMP choked on .AVI files among others, due to a lack of codecs. Not to pick on WiMP, all the video-enabled players except VLC choked.) Finding and installing a third-party codec pack solved this. Loading a single file manually is a bit clumsy, you have to right-click on the titlebar, which gives you a menu. Looks like it’s their way of forcing you to use the library function.

VLC isn’t the pretty boy on the block, that’s for sure, that is, until you skin it up. videolan.org has a collection of skins as well. The major points earned by VLC is that it just works. Many of us have had to go codec hunting to play that video file we grabbed somewhere, not with VLC, which requires no codecs to be installed, unless you get into some seriously advanced stuff, and you can grab the plugins from the videolan.org site. The interface, unskinned, is quite simple and easy to use. The playlist/library feature is pretty weak, some of the skins have improved on this, so I’ve heard. I’d strenuously urge anyone using VLC to grab a skin, the default is clumsy and awkward.

QCD comes ‘out of the box’ looking pretty good, but like the others, is skinnable. There are, at last count, over 350 skins from geeky to freaky to choose from, with more being submitted all the time. I loved the QCD interface. All controls I would use on a regular basis are right at hand, including a pull-out equalizer with a slew of presets. I blew about 20 minutes playing with those…go figure. Simple minds, simple pleasures, I guess? I then shot another 5 minutes playing with the “Splooge and Gush” visualization that reacts to being moused over. Kinda like those damn plasma globes…I can’t leave em alone. The playlist is easy to use and had plenty of features to keep me busy running it through it’s paces. Video playback presented an annoyance. Once codecs were provided, my .AVI file opened in a separate window, not as part of the QCD UI. This window had to be closed separately from the player. Odd. It actually opened itself on my other monitor. Even more odd.

That’s all for part one, folks! As always, if there is any aspect of a review you think I’ll miss, please leave a comment telling me what you’d like to know!

Check back daily, part two will be soon to follow.

Conversation Tags: Windows Media Player, QCD, Foobar, XMplayer, VLC, media players