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Many people claim that what's so great about VLC is that it doesn't need codecs to playback video files. Yay! Well, that's just not true, in fact, that's quite impossible. All video files are encoded somehow, and in order to playback the video it must be decoded first. Hence the codec.

VLC uses the libavcodec codec to decode video. This codec handles a lot of different formats (see list) where codecs usually just handle one format. This approach has benefits and drawbacks. The obvious benefit is that the codec-hunting days of yore can be dispensed with. The less-than-obvious drawback is that a multi-purpose tool is almost never as good as a dedicated tool. The truth is that VLC very often doesn't playback video with the same quality as players using dedicated codecs.

I recommend using a player with dedicated codecs. I use BSPlayer, as it is easy on the resources, stable, with extensive, configurable features (it is ugly though, so change the skin for your own sake). Other players are probably just as good, but after having tried all the popular ones, this is my favorite. Install codecs only when necessary; use GSpot to figure out which is needed. Do not use codec packs, they are evil.

This being said, I do use VLC as a can opener for the occasional weird video file. For this use, VLC is great!

I'm going to offer up my suggestion for an alternative to Media Player Classic, BSPlayer. The featureset of MPC is nice, but I've never been able to stand the interface (and yes, I thought the interface to WMP6 was horrible back in the day). BSPlayer has most, if not all, of the features of MPC, as well as some decent skins (I prefer the included Showtime skin myself).

BSPlayer http://www.bsplayer.org/

BSPlayer for movies, its fast and fairly lightweight. theres free, and non-free versions on the BSPlayer site

SmartFTP - n00b friendly FTP client - free for home/non-commercial use

pretty obvious what the following 3 are:
Apache
MySQL
PHP

PostCast SMTP server

CrapCleaner! cleans crap from your PC! temp files, MRUs, deletes invalid registry stuff. Whenever I use it, it usually free's up ~1GB on my hard drive! quite amazing how much crap there is on XP

Firefox and Thunderbird

Let me just add that BSPlayer is an amazing program that runs much faster and easier than any current Windows Media Player version (admitedly, I have no problems with the 'unsupported' WMP 6.x but you can't get that from Microsoft anymore). I'm surprised more people on the Windows platform haven't heard it. In addition to a wide variety of features like subtitles, surround sound, faster seeking and... well actually I'm not very good at remembering which features WMP also has. But here's something really cool... BSPlayer can play incomplete files fairly well. That's right, corrupted downloads or badly compressed video is no longer a problem... as long as you have the appropriate codecs installed (still a necessary evil to install them manually, Gregorian Knot helps though)... you can view it. Even from unfinished P2P.

Having just pronounced my love for BSPlayer, let me just say that an open-source application named VideoLAN plays incomplete files even better than BSPlayer, but it falls short in many other areas. I believe it's original purpose is to view streaming media off of a network.

Foobar 2000 for all your audio needs.
BSPlayer for all your video needs.
Koepi's codec pack for all your codec needs.

I use bsplayer. It's lightweight (compared to WMP anyways), and it does the only thing I need a freaking media player to do, play videos.

1. Trillian Pro - I use AIM, Y!, ICQ, IRC, and MSN chat clients. I use Trillian to notify me of updates to RSS feeds. I also use it to check POP3 e-mail accounts and Y! and HoTMaiL accounts. I also order my buddy list into Groups and Sub-Groups. Trillian also logs all chats which comes in handy on occasions. I also download the Aikon3 skin for Trillian. Trillian support secure profiles in case you have multiple people using the same install of Trillian.
Trillian website
Aikon 3 website w/Trilliain screenshots

2. Firefox - Light-weight, pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing rocks. And the plugins are very useful. All web designers should use the "Web Development" extension for Firefox. It allows you to automatically resize any webpage, disable images, cookies, java, ..., validates, and so much more. Save a lot time for the web devs. The "EditCSS" extension is cool because you can run your own CSS on other people's websites (make Slashdot fit your blog theme). Oh, and the Mozilla Google Toolbar for Firefox is a "must install". (I also install the Google bar for IE).
Firefox website

3. Microsoft Powertoys for XP (TweakUI) - A Microsoft download that allows for extra and powerful control of XP. Basically, it allows you to make some neat changes to your Registry that allows for increased productivity and usability. Tweaking XP made easy.
Microsoft Powertoys website

4. Versaverter - a neat little units converter that came in very helpful during my Engineering education. It has virtually every unit imaginable.
Versaverter website

5. Winamp5 - Light-weight MP3 player. Also play other media formats both audio and video. Skinnable, scalable, dockable, and extendable. I use only this program to playback MP3's. I like docking my Winamp screen at the bottom of my monitor. It's only about 20 pixels high. I also like right-clicking an MP3 folder and selecting Play in Winamp.
Winamp website

6. BS Player - Light-weight Video player. Playback video in half-time, double-time, resizable video screen, skinnable, commandline support, and more. My favorite video media player as I haven't found a player that gives me more control of the video I am watching.
BS Player website

7. Colorpad - tiny little .exe and GUI eyedropper utility. Use the eyedropper to get the HEX or HTML value of any pixel on screen. I don't think there's any current support for this app. Still, it's very handy and takes up little screen area with the right skin.
Colorpad @ Deviant Art

8. Winzip - compress and decompress files. Duh.
Winzip website

9. TravelAxe - Find cheap hotels from around the world. Puts information from popular travel websites into a sortable spreadsheet. Sorts by price, 1,2,3,4,5 Star rating, and more.
TravelAxe website

10. Musicmatch Jukebox - The only reason I install this software is to convert my audio CDs into MP3 archives. That part of this software is powerful and flexible. Don't use it for anything else.
Musicmatch website

• Well IE vs. Netscape isn't from a TV show, it's reality. Perhaps you weren't paying attention when it all happenned, or weren't on the net then,

Well I was on the net then. Netscape 4.x sucked, most ISPs gave out Netscape 3.x and even in the begining 4.x to all their users, but as time went on:

• Netscape kept changing how plugins where handled. Their "centralized" page for downloading plugins was horribly unorganized and always being altered to some other unorganized scheme
• Crashed. Continiously. Horribly.
• Used an outdated rendering engine that required the complete page be downloaded before it could be rendered. Ick.
• Generally sucked, was slow, unstable, and ate up RAM. This was on any platform!

Internet Explorer in comparison:

• Had a smaller memory footprint (more or less ^_^ )
• Had a slimmer UI
• Had a single unified way of installing plugins (even if in retrospect it also, years later, allowed for the proliferation of spyware and adware, oops! At least it worked at the time!)
• Was quick to boot (yah yah so it was integrated with the OS, nobody was stopping Netscape from loading up a minimalistic framework at boot time to allow for reduced delay upon starting the program!)
• Had a modern rendering engine

It took the Mozilla project years to remove all the cruft that existed in Netscape 4.x (maybe it would have been better if they had started from the 3.x code instead. . . .), and just recently (within the last year and a half or so) has FireFox (and FireBird before that) been able to compete with IE for sheer speed and memory usage.

FireFox is actually a superior browser to IE in many respect, I still use IE because I am so acustom to hitting WindowKey-E to open an explorer window which I then hit F4 to go to the URL line and enter a site address. Browser/OS integration rocks, like it or not, it IS what the users want!

And MS has never "locked" anybody out from replacing Explorer entirely, it is quite easy to change Windows shells, in fact a number of companies specialize in doing exactly that! Nobody has created a new integrated file manager / web browser yet (or if they have, it has yet to become main stream) but MS is not keeping anybody from doing so. For all the Win9x OSs, it was a simple one line alteration to change interfaces (and in fact for awhile I had command.com as my interface instead of Explorer), and with the NT line it is just a simple registery alteration.

• Netscape started crashing MORE after MS decided they wanted the browser market.

Netscape 4.x sucked. Period. 4.7 sucked even more. 3.x never had problems, before or after MS entered the market. 4.x was bloatware, and even some ex-Netscape employees have said such, it just sucked.

• There's also the current issue with Windows Media Player. Tried to find anything else out there to compete with it? Quicktime and Real both don't work quite right with formats outside their native ones. I spent a week hunting for an alternative media player with AVI and Mpeg files that I could do playlists with at one point.

You've got to be an idiot then, either that or the WORST google user ever.

BSPlayer solves all your problems.

Most sane Media players on Windows use DirectShow and VFW, meaning ALL media players can play ALL formats of video, except for those formats that refuse to write a DirectShow or VFW decoder. (such as Real and Sorenson (the codec most often used for quicktime).

Winamp also works, but I would really like a way to dock just the video window on the screen and have the rest of the interface dissapear (I think there is an option for that somewhere but. . . .)

As it is I use Windows Media Player 6.2 (start-->Run, type in m

bsplayer does all of those things while using less system resources than WMPlayer.

However, even if they are told to remove their media player, it will most likely be how you can "remove" MS Messenger. Hell, last time I reformated and uninstalled MS Messenger it didn't even delete the icon which as far as I can tell, is all it is supposed to do.

Most people using Windows won't use WiMP to play DVDs.

Sure, but they do use WMP to play other video formats, and most .avi and MPEG-1 files use hardware acceleration. How about .asf files streaming from online? Or .wmv? My point was not the DVDs, but the fact that Windows Media Player, the self described "best Player yet" with "over 120 new features" (quoted here) does not have a screenshot button -- and hasn't had it for nine versions. Adding to the end users' confusion, everything Microsft-related, from the help files, to the online FAQs, to the tech support, to the Common Tasks bar, tells the user that if they are using Windows, they better be using Windows Media Player. Linux distros are all about choice. Their websites and literature say, "Here are four different media player programs, and their features. Choose one that you like the best."

But the point of this thread is the GUI... and that being said, WMP sucks. It's bloated with too many features, most of which are hard to find or understand (for Joe, not for Slashdotters-- and that doesn't imply Joe is stupid. He just doesn't need to know about codecs, keyframes, and audio streams to watch an emailed video of his nephew's baseball game.). And I will take predictable locations of buttons over skinability any day. Just fluff, if you ask me: not to be developed at the expense of functionality. If Microsoft took the time to write a stable, sleek, and easy to use media player, I would probably use it. But as it is, I stick with BSPlayer and Media Player Classic.

...(which is a great, simple, media player - something that doesn't seem to exist on Windows)

To which I retort: BS Player. And his points about screenshots could easily be combined, I'm not seeing much content in the article to be honest.

I play all my media files with Media Player Classic and BS Player . I also use Real Alternate and Quicktime Alternate. I just dont see the reason why I would want to install another media player (unless I really wanted bloatware/spyware).

Or you could just use the best one around at the moment (IMHO), BSplayer

I have yet to find a video player that works as well as WMP.
I use BSPlayer
It includes every exotic feature I ever heard of, like subtitling, multiple audio streams, custom aspect ratio AND there's no stupid DRM included.

Oh, and it's free. Naturally.

• The Bat! mail client (shareware)
• Opera browser/mail/newsclient (adware), much more lightweight than Mozilla
• 40tude Dialog newsclient
• Total Commander file manager (shareware)
• eMule peer-to-peer client (open source)
• ViM
• editor (open source)
• GhostScript and GSView for PostScript and PDF rendering/conversion/manipulation (open source)
• ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl for scripting
• 7-zip packer

Here are my most favorite windows apps. Some are free. All at least have trials. They are in no particular order.

Firewall: BlackIce
Virus Scanner: AVG Anti-Virus
Instant Messaging: Trillian
Movie Player: BSPlayer
Web Browser: Slim Browser
Mail Client: The Bat!
Taskbar Improvement: True Launcher Bar
SpyWare Protection: Spybot Search & Destroy
File Compression: Win Rar
Hex Editor: Hex Workshop
Audio Player: Winamp
Ternimal Emulator (telnet/ssh/etc): SecureCRT

Some free, Free and not so free applications:

Webbrowser Mozilla Firebird (Win / linux)
Email Eudora (win) Evolution (linux)
Office suite OpenOffice.org 1.1 (win / linux)
SSH client putty (win) openssh (linux)
Videoplayer VLC (win / linux) or BSPlayer (win) and Xine (linux)
Editor Textpad (windows) Kate (linux)
Chat Jabber PSI (win / linux)
Firewall Kerio (win)
Anti virus F-Secure (not free) (win)

- Ost

I have had much better luck with BS Player and Zoom Player.

BSplayer is a nice fast, compact media player for windows. It does divx, avi, mp3, ogg vorbis and some other formats rather well. In fact when I couldn't get some divx movies to run without massive frame skips in windows media player and "the playa", I tried BSplayer on advice from a message board and got wonderful results. www.bsplayer.org

Under EO Video, it was a lot less jerky but still had pauses. And the sound was out of sync as well, about 2 seconds behind the video. I'm currently converting the video to AVI (using XVID compression), and it's taking quite a while (15 minutes and it's about halfway done).

There, it's done, and playing under BSPlayer , it isn't jerky but is somewhat pixelated during fast motion scenes. (The file went from 99 MB down to 17 MB from the XVID compression.) The sound is still wrong, it seems more off than under EO Video (3-5 seconds instead of 2).

From another comment, I downloaded and tried Media Player Classic but it was as bad as QuickTime.

Anyone else having these problems? It doesn't seem to make sense, as I have a decent processor and 1.5 GB RAM...

Why would anybody want to watch an entire movie in 5 seconds, certainly my ability to absorb information is not as good as that and I regard it to be rather high(Toung in cheek).

One of the features I love about BSplayer is the ability to increase/decrease playback speed by 10%.

Recently I downloaded all the Family Guy episodes, and watching them at 20% faster makes them sound more like SouthPark than Family Guy, but it saves me something like 5 minutes per 21 minute episode. And it's mostly intelligible. ;-)

I can't recommended BSPlay highly enough. Give it a try.

I've used a much earlier version when I started using divx ;-) However it was quickly given up for BSPlayer (yeah, great name :) which has done nicely until now. Apparently it's not spyware.

I think at the time the only advantage Redlight had was to do with subtitles but I could be wrong.