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Don't forget the VideoLAN player. I downloaded it the other day for Win32 and was most impressed. The UI is kind of arcane, but it is able to play DVDs (with decss built in) and all sorts of audio and media content straight out of the box.

There's some people who compiled the Linux MPlayer for Windows (see this page, scroll down to the Windows section). It works great for all sorts of stuff, including streams (mpeg, real), Quicktime, DVDs, etc. There is no user interface (command line), but you can just drop stuff onto the icon or tell windows to use mplayer.exe to open files. And you can do pretty much everything in MPlayer with keyboard shortcuts, so the lack of a UI doesn't bother me, at least.

There's also VideoLAN Client (VLC). It plays a lot of stuff and has a UI (not that great, but it works). It understands a whole bunch of formats, too.

Just a note, the software uses iTunes/Quicktime to play the protected AAC files from iTMS. VLC can play protected AAC files without any additional software. Would be nice if Real could do the same.

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What happened to the Censorware Project?

As a programmer, I have to wonder a little bit about Jon. Maybe he's just more l33t than me. Check out the VideoLAN source respository. The core DRM decryption file is 1014 lines of uncommented C, excluding the GPL comment at the top. Including exciting recursive preprocessor macros. *shudder*

drms.c

How the heck did he write 1000 lines of nasty bit-twiddling code without a single comment to remind himself of what he was doing? Is it the output of a disassembler cobbled back together into C? Did he intentionally strip the comments before checking it in? Why do that?

Any ideas?

Apple gave them a design award...

Also I noticed Videolan Web Stats Only the 5th day of January

December Hits: 21144279
January Hits: 10434135

Already half of last months traffic!

Apple gave them a design award...

Also I noticed Videolan Web Stats Only the 5th day of January

December Hits: 21144279
January Hits: 10434135

Already half of last months traffic!

Quick, get the files before Apple C&D's VideoLAN!!!!

This sounds similar to the VideoLAN project.

A great idea tho, tried it out a few years back to much success.

I couldn't agree more. QuickTime is the default movie player in OS X, and not supporting full screen makes it look very cheap. On the other hand, there's Cellulo, which is a very nice QuickTime-based player and is free. I also use VLC, which uses its own codecs, and has (in my opinion) a nicer UI.

i know. i hate apple! it's not like you can't find any free alternatives with fullscreen built in that even play more media formats by default.

Use VideoLan Client. It plays all your crappy windows media formats and it's open source! It works on just about any platform. About all it doesn't play is realmedia.

But who wants to use these garbage formats anyway. Stick with a standard format like MPG or DIVX or something. You might even want to try one of those scary open formats too!

I'll throw VideoLAN into the mix. It succeded with some files (read: Paris Hilton video) where other players failed.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Should play most everything!

That someone sue over the 10 minutes of commercials I'm forced to watch after putting a DVD in.

What commercials?

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A good Media player that I like is Core Media Player. But media players are getting to be a dime a dozen. Video Lan Client isn't too bad.

Under the multimedia heading, he missed the excellent and well maintained and developed Video Lan Client which I thought was a shame since it's quite alot more architecture important than mplayer in terms of streaming delivery of content, and interconnectivity.

...if you buy a DVD expecting to play it on a Linux system, then you're an idiot, pure and simple.

You can try using VLC Player/Encoder/Everything... which pretty much is a quicktime type player that does EVERYTHING and then some. Just check out the file type compatibility chart, it supports everything I can think of and even runs on such operating systems as BeOS, which by the way, probably supports this "out of the box" as BeOS was pretty much built around digital media... Dave

I've already downloaded and installed this and it is without a doubt one of the worse releases of a piece of software I've seen. In the past my copy of Media Player would at least run some of the videos that QuickTime wouldn't, now nothing. I've tried running every WMV file I could get my hands on and none of them play. It seems that Microsoft has chosen to go with less functionality, not more.

It's an interesting move for Microsoft, especially after the release of iTunes for Windows. Apple is doing it's best to convert Microsoft users by offering them incredible software. Microsoft is offering Mac users shitty knockoffs of Windows software.

I'm guessing this is a gambit to make Mac users realize they can't have the cross-platform operability that OSX seemed to bring about, that if they want to use Windows files they should run Windows. Ultimately I think the frustration that people will feel towards the new Media Player will cause even more resentment towards Microsoft. Apple's attitude that you lure more flies with Aqua than you do with water is definately the winning strategy.

If you don't already know (and chances are if you're reading Slashdot you do), you should be using VLC. It does everything this crappy Windows port does and more.

That's getting out of my realm of experience. This might help you: http://developers.videolan.org/. Or it might not. That's all the more I can offer, hope it gives you some good leads.

I was looking for Mozilla and VLC. But I guess it is pretty hard to limit the voting to 20 projects.

Actually digital video on personal computers more or less started with QuickTime a loooooong time ago. If you bother to write plug-ins you can get about any thinkable codec to quicktime, it also plays flash movies does interactive stuff, now supports dolby 5.1 audio etc.

(and there's VLC for the Mac and Mplayer OS X)

Sure you can, provided you have the latest and greatest hardware and take pains to keep it all up to date. But that begs the question: Is Internet Week's core reader base gamers? Somehow I doubt it. IW's tagline is: "Technology that Connects the Internet."

We're talking about doing work with your computer. So your comments about games are automagically irrelevant.

You mention video formats, but then use MP3 audio as an example. Curious. Anyway, if you've used QuickTime content creation tools, you know that QuickTime is more than just a playback mechanism. It's an extremely powerful, extremely flexible multimedia platform. Although not that many business users I know are interested in downloading bad P2P copies of movies, there are methods for watching xvid on a Mac.

So your arguments against Apple (your use of the term "Apple" rather than "Mac" in a conversation about operating systems is a dead giveaway that you're not really a Mac user) are invalid.

Let's talk about Linux and Windows, since you conveniently ignore how easy Macs are to set up. It takes you an hour to configure a new Windows system, but it takes you weeks or months to get a Linux system working. That's mighty strange, friend. Maybe you haven't set up a Linux system in a while. But you're missing the point anyway. We're talking about enterprise use here.

While I agree that Linux on the desktop might not be ready for prime-time in many respects, it's also a perfectly valid replacement for Windows in many enterprise situations. It runs servers and networks quite well. A well-configured Linux distro is perfect for many business users because it eliminates all kinds of increased support costs due to Outlook/Office security problems. Eliminating this one set of problems alone can save a large Windows-using organization big money.

To summarize:
1) You can play a lot of games on Windows if you are sure to keep your system up to date.
2) #1 is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.
3) If you are really wasting time at work and want to play xvid on your Mac, you can.
4) Modern Linux distros are extremely easy to set up and can provide major cost savings for enterprise organizations that are tired of fighting with money-draining Outlook/Office security problems.

I can only give you my top 10 and hope it ties in with other peoples:

Anti Virus - AVG - Updated regularly and free for non commercial use - FREE
Browser - Mozilla - A stable and standards compliant browser, and not tied in with the OS unlike IE! - FREE
Compression - PowerArchiver - Freeware ZIP/RAR/CAB/LHA/TAR/etc/etc! - FREE
Security - ZoneAlarm - For piece of mind when connected - FREE
Email - MailWasher - Eliminate spam without downloading to your computer - FREE
Registry - RegCleaner - An invaluable registry tool - FREE
MP3 - WinAmp - Still my fav MP3 player after all these years - FREE
MPEG - VLC - A very comprehensive media player - FREE
CD - Daemon Tools - A CD emulator, once a gamer has used this they never uninstall it! - FREE
Games - MAME - An arcade emulator... essential for people over the age of 25! - FREE
FTP & Download - LeechFTP - Unintrusive, easy to use, hard to crash (unlike BPFTP) - FREE


Well thats my two penneth anyway :o)

Mozilla Firebird
Mozilla Thunderbird
OpenOffice.org
AVG Anti-Virus
Gaim
VLC Media Player
Spybot Search & Destroy

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

VLC is great on any platform.

VLC from VideoLAN accepts almost all the formats MPlayer groks. The major exceptions are the ones for which there is no GPL-compatible implementation. It can also transcode streams into different formats, or send them to the network, serve them as HTTP, etc. It is truly cross-platform and the Windows and OS X ports are extremely popular.

VLC is pretty good too, better for me because my mac is an older machine and the OS X version of mplayer doesn't always work well with my hardware (iBook 500).

Just get the Free media player VLC which works on windows, os x, linux and some others as well. It will play all regions even if you don't have a region free DVD drive.

As others have said you can get an alternative player to play in full screen, for instance VideoLan plays quicktime movies (well all the QT movies I've tried, including the revolutions trailer) and allows you to set it to full screen. VLC is free and is a pretty efficent media player so give that a try instead.

Neither is the iTMS, which uses the AAC format specifically because it's DRM-enabled. Granted, the DRM is less onerous than any of the other competing choices, and the fact that AAC provides better sound quality at the same bitrate is a bonus.

DRM issues aside, AAC has the advantage of being an open audio format. Anyone can implement AAC and not need a license from M$ or Apple, or trying to reverse engineer the software. Some AAC compatible open source solutions can be found on Sourceforge.net. To list some:
- AAC player for XMMS
- Freeware Advanced Audio Coder
- VLC

Now bring DRM back into the picture and it places a limitation on AAC, but no more than Microsoft's solution.

All this to say the iPod need not be the only personal digital music player to support AAC.

Open source and everything too :).

Don't forget VLC. I haven't gotten the "LAN" part of it to work yet, but it works great simply as a video player.

There is also VLC, which is open source and very complete.

For OS X, I spent an age trying to get various codecs working in Quicktime to view variously encoded episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm which probably won't be aired in the UK before 2005. The recent Mac DivX codecs solved a lot of these, but I didn't like the fact that they came in an installer package - I try to stick to drag-installs on the Mac so I know what's where. Then I gave VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) a try, and in OS X at least, it works like a charm. I haven't found anything it won't run yet, it plays DVDs without any region checking (provided your firmware is fixed), and it handles VCDs to boot. It really does do everything I need it to in a proper one-app drag install, and it's GPL. Definitly worth a look for Apple users - which isn't to say Mplayer isn't worthy, too.

Nah, probably something like this Availiable for major destkop platforms.

Actually, we do have an open source DVD player for Linux. At least three of them in fact:
xine
mplayer
VideoLAN client

The only thing that's illegal is the CSS decryption libraries needed to play most (but not all) CSS "protected" DVDs.

Eugh! Mplayer on OS X? I have to say my experiences were not pleasant. It was slow and really not worth much time or effort.

Personally, I (and all other Mac users I know) far prefer VLC - the VideoLAN player, which is unbloated, fast and pretty. It's also far more cross-platform (Win, Mac, BeOS, Linux, *BSD, amongst others) and actually possible to compile from source without setting aside a day to hack around. It also has the nifty feature of playing region-encumbered DVDs on different-region drives without any need for firmware programming or anything (certainly on Windows).

YMMV, but mplayer, as is widely reported on the Internet, is murder to compile. In addition, the developers are unbearably arrogant and unhelpful (the fuss they made over GCC 2.96 springs to mind). I've also generally found it to have rather high CPU requirements - it is always bitching that my machines are too slow when other software is perfectly capable of playing the same file.

But anyway, if you like MPlayer on OS X, I'd wager you'll love VLC.

iqu :)

Why not just use the VideoLAN Client?

I second that ... mod the parent up. I use the VLC client on my Mac because Apple wants $29.95 for full-screen Quicktime ... forget about it. VLC is cross-platform and it's all I need.

What exactly will this mean for open-source video player vlc? Looking for Mac or PC support, or a web/database developer, in the NYC area?

Why not just use the VideoLAN Client?

It does a lot more than I will ever need it to.

Why not just use the VideoLAN Client?

It does a lot more than I will ever need it to.

I hear you.

Firstly, for those who don't know (and yes there are many who don't know even on slashdot,) macrovision is a (very poorly implemented and easily bypassed with the right gear) anti-copying technology the causes the picture to get darker and brighter all the time. On analogue media they play around with the luminance signal and on DVD it's just a macrovision bit that they turn on. You can get macrovision filters to clean this sort of thing up.

The last time I tried to use my iBook as a DVD player using the composite jack on an external TV, the same thing happenned. The Apple DVD player sent a macrovision signal out with the composite signal. Fortunately I happenned to have VLC which allowed me to properly play the DVD that I had bought within my own rights.

Alas, stories like this are considered by the industry to be collateral damage.

Blockquoth the poster:

I'm not sure what you mean by "full", but I'm told it will plan encrypted wma files.

Windows Media Player for Mac OS X is slow, buggy, and incompatible with the latest WM formats. Both VideoLAN and MPlayer do a better job of playing Windows Media files on OS X.

And yes, I speak from experience.

You probably have neither the server software nor the X extensions to be able to do this the X11 way. My point was simply that, in principle, it's quite feasible to use X11 for video streaming through the X11 protocol. In fact, it's a shame that people haven't built more software to do this because it would be much cleaner and nicer than the DRI hacks and viewers people are kludging together right now.

In any case, the simple answer to your question is: use VideoLAN.

Technically, the DMCA doen't make it illegal to circumvent the CSS encoding. Telling us how you did it could land you in a federal holding pen.
Wow, so if I tell you to google for VideoLan client I'm breaking the law?
What if I just gave away the link right here where anyone could see?

FYI -- this also works under Windows, and is free. No, it doesn't have the same goofy skins as WinDVD Super-Dee-Duper-Pro. You watch your controller's skin, I'll watch the damn movie thankyouverymuch.

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You said you wanted to watch TV on it, I gave you three solutions. Have you tried using a PC/Linux DVB card and VideoLAN?

VLC works just fine

"Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC."

So, what are our alternatives?

Media Player: VLC, MPlayer for OS X

MSN Messenger: Proteus, Fire

Office: Apple Works, Keynote as Powerpoint Replacement, Open Office, AbiWord, Gnumeric

Outlook: Apple Mail.app, iCal, Evolution,

Virtual PC: Ya, well, maybe sometime RealPC will appear after they settle with Microsoft. But who uses that stuff anyway?

Last but not least, Internet Explorer: Safari, Camino, Mozilla and maybe soon again Omniweb, thanks to WebCore. (Yes, i left out Opera & iCab)

Okay, did i miss something? ;-)