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>he hasn't heard of the media library pane in vlc

http://wiki.videolan.org/Media_Library

--
BMO

Actually, you can to this easily with VLC, since it supports ASCII streaming of video files. Take a look at the available video outputs. Quite an amusing april fools prank, but a better one would have been switching back to '90s realvideo (H.263) with the soul-crushing, endless pre-buffering.

Assuming you are talking about the MP3 plugin it is free (as in beer) and the source code is available under the MIT license, which is GPL compatible. A similar approach could be used for H.264 and AAC decoders in Mozilla and Opera.

Open source implementations, for instance using the GPL, of H.264 and other codecs aren't illegal or disallowed as many people seem to think. In fact they are readily available and used by different companies who pay the licensing fees (if applicable). For instance Google distributes the FFMpeg H.264 decoder (GPL) with Chrome and has recently started using x264 (GPL) for their video encoding on Youtube. AFAIK they pay licensing fees for Chrome, but not for their Youtube use since the don't use more than 100.000 encoders.

My Dark Shikari is newer ;-)
Source

Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support?
The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases.
The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.

That's...an incredible under-statement on your part!

Well, yeah, and I also understand why you are disinclined to being diplomatic. I've been modded troll for posting the comparisons linked in my post here on slashdot and the "It's just as good. really!!!" crowd is getting on my nerves as well. I especially hate the "you don't need to trust that comparison, try encoding yourself" crowd, because they obviously never followed their own advice or they wouldn't make such statements.

x264 started being developed at about the same time the Theora bitstream was frozen and if you look at the progress both projects have made it looks pretty bad for Theora. x264 had at most one or two main developers (concurrently) and a couple of contributors, summer of code projects and a few corporate sponsored improvements and look what they managed to create. A new unique rate control (1; 2), low latency error resilient encoding(3), psy optimizations(4), speed optimizations(5) for multiple processing architectures(6) and it's widely used. Youtube, Facebook, other companies, the guys who post 720p encodes on bittorrent, you name it!
At the same time Theora still has problems doing encodes without losing frames if you want to hit a certain filesize. I like Theora, it's good to have a free alternative when you need one, but Xiph could have done a lot more with it in the time they had and the codec has a really annoying fanclub.

One of the problems Xiph has in my opinion is that they want to do everything. They have a bunch of good codecs (mainly audio) like Vorbis, FLAC, Speex and CELT, but then they develop their own container and subtitle formats instead of just using or adapting the ones that are all ready out there and better than what Xiph has to offer (MKV, ASS/SSA to name two). With Theora they went the adaption route but took a little too long to deliver. They don't even have to innovate. They should just look at x264 (especially mb-tree and the psy optimizations), see how they can adapt it for Theora and port it over and bam! you've got a halfway decent free video codec.

In the United States, x264 is considered warez because distribution thereof infringes a third party's right.

Really? You should tell Youtube, Facebook, Avail Media and all the other US companies currently using x264 that they are using warez. If you pay the licensing fees you can use x264 however you want. Companies are regularly sponsoring the development of features the want implemented, for instance low latency encoding or streaming improvements. Most private use is probably covered by the less than 100k = free clause in the MPEG licensing agreement and it's not like the MPEG-LA really cares what you use to rip your DVDs.

Perfect example of DRM gone wrong and hurting consumers: A guy I know actually bought the media center edition of WinXP, (yes, I know) and recorded some video on an older-model hand held and then tried to play the resulting AVI file. I was called on to help them debug why it wasn't playing. I don't recall the exact error message now, but it was something related to an unknown author (Media Player was default). So on a wild hunch I downloaded and installed vlc real quick to test my theory and it played perfectly. Way to go Micro$oft, yet another normal user who will never buy your products again.

The problem is if ACTA goes through, there will be no choice. Something must be done to take these players drafting this piece of crap down or out before governments have a chance to sign away our rights to choose.

slashdot ate my link

I'm suprised no-one else has mentioned it, but VLC has had streaming capabilities for a long time.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html

You can also use 'a big fat pipe' and get some really high quality images.
Mungewell.

Can't, sorry:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/ Line Number 77, Column 184:

It appears you're using Microsoft's flavor of Javascript, which has notorious issues with my brower/platform of choice (Firefox/Linux).

There might be an apt analogy here to the situation between x264 and h264, but I'm too tired right now to explore the idea further.

By the way, I'm a professional videographer/photographer/editor/graphic designer. I personally have made use of x264 (in VLC), but I would be extremely hesitant to use it on a professional project, where I was prominent as the author, due to it's extremely shaky legal foundation in the US. I'm not a lawyer, but I have three decades of experience plowing through IP/copyright law (with the help of lawyers) as practiced in the US. Frankly speaking, I feel that the x264 implementation doesn't have a legal leg to stand on in the US and the EU, and if you'll do some basic research you'll find that there are many IP lawyers on both continents who concur with my view. You're exposing yourself to huge risks by using the x264 libraries, and distributing the works thereof...at least where I live.

The recent FAT32 fiasco where Microsoft lowered the boom on TomTom is a direct compare. TomTom assumed they were in the clear since an open source reverse-engineer (dosftools) had been in use for quite a while by many vendors, until Microsoft's legal team educated them otherwise.

http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2006-August/002052.html

Use RTSP to stream and StreamTorrent for distribution. There are RTSP implementations to fit most any budget and need. Even something as basic as Videolan could work, depending on how much effort want to contribute on your own (or delegate). Using a StreamTorrent network might help with load balancing, especially if audience size exceeds capacity. But it really comes down to network capacity, audience size, desired content quality, and how much you want/need to 'protect' that content. - RTSP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Streaming_Protocol - StreamTorrent: http://groups.google.com/group/streamtorrent?pli=1 - VideoLAN: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html -kf

x264 (which is the h264-compatible codec used in VLC)

x264 is only an encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. It does not handle decoding.

is a cleanroom reverse-engineering job. So, it's technically not h264. Just very compatible

Citation definitely needed. The project calls itself a H.264/AVC encoder.

I'm guessing because there are possible legal patent-related issues surrounding a reverse-engineered codec like x264.

Being implemented through reverse-engineering doesn't matter. Anyway, it seems the specification is freely downloadable.

Also, stop acting like anyone actully cares about the legal status of codecs. If anyone did then ffmpeg, vlc, etc would not exist.

I thought VLC, ffmepg and others are going to be in trouble if the EU legalized software patents. That leads me to believe that they (VLC, ffmpeg, et al) are based in Europe or somehow are able to use the lack of software patents there to their advantage.

Brief quote from VLC's press release:

The end draws near...

VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include MPlayer, xine, Freevo, MythTV, gstreamer.

WTF? It's like saying somebody should buy an F1 car just because it's fastest

I agree 100%. People should buy a machine to suit their needs. Anyone who blindly buys the fastest model available is just being egotistical and foolish.

which does not cost them their house and children

A new Mac mini goes for $599 and a MacBook is $999. This is hardly "house and children" figures. Pick a reasonable Mac then go to Dell and spec out a similar machine. The PC prices will be in a close neighborhood.

not require special fuel and can run on ordinary road

This article is not about the iPhone. It is about Apple systems running OS X that can utilize Boot Camp.

Hardly any "special fuel" required on OS X systems. Take your pick from any of the great open source apps available for the platform: Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, Gimp, VLC, Eclipse, the list goes on. Wanna write some code? Xcode comes free with OS X. Don't wanna use Xcode, then use another IDE or directly use make, gcc, gdb, and vim.

As for your "ordinary road" comment ... I'm writing this on a four year old iMac. Over the years I've upgraded the memory (Crucial has great prices) and hard drive (1TB was only $99 at Fry's). My mouse of choice is a five button Logitech scroll mouse. I hardly feel "locked in" or "abused".

Way to go on a tangent!

Way to spread FUD. How about we just let people use the computer that best suits their needs.

Getting back on topic, I've been running Windows 7 in both Boot Camp and Parallels 5 with no problems. I don't know what the damage is with this "article".

Since "Linux" is not one operating system as Windows is, I'll stick to a Linux-based OS that is easy to install, very popular and that I know best: Ubuntu.

With respect to your tasks, Google instantly found me: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/allow-remote-control-to-your-desktop-on-ubuntu/ , http://www.ubuntugeek.com/unison-file-synchronization-tool.html , and
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ubuntu.html

I'm no kernel hacker (hax0r implies cracker) but I do know how to type search terms into Google. I'm genuinely curious about how one would quickly figure out how to do those things on Windows without using a web search engine.

VLC for Mac death is "greatly exaggerated" / What is Lunettes?

VLC for Mac is being maintained. However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time.

The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC. Its codename is Lunettes.

Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not "Mac" enough.

Taken from here.

OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).

Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.

Check out

http://www.videolan.org/developers/

I have dealt with the "previous" Mac developers, and they are nice, pleasant people. As far as I understand, the Mac "port" of VLC is basically a Cocoa/Mac-goodness wrapper around libvlc, the library all the VL clients are based on. libvlc is developed by a different team of volunteers, under the auspices of the VideoLan Project (like the VideoLan Clients are). So you probably won't see too much video or audio processing as a VLC Mac developer unless you go out of your way to find some (or volunteer for the libvlc team too).

I submitted the story. I'm not a member of the dev team, but give the popularity of VLC on this platform it absolutely astounded me this issue had not appeared on a major news site yet.

The forum thread linked from the article suggests you present yourself to the developer mailing list.

here is a list of all the videolan project's mailing lists - I believe the one they want you to contact them through is vlc-devel

Thank you for offering, i'd do so myself if i were not utterly sub-novice.

I submitted the story. I'm not a member of the dev team, but give the popularity of VLC on this platform it absolutely astounded me this issue had not appeared on a major news site yet.

The forum thread linked from the article suggests you present yourself to the developer mailing list.

here is a list of all the videolan project's mailing lists - I believe the one they want you to contact them through is vlc-devel

Thank you for offering, i'd do so myself if i were not utterly sub-novice.

Another idea might be to look at VLC for your streaming server with either IP set top boxes with a web based interface (LAMP). I know that Amino can provide IPTV set top boxes that will work work H.264 and should be able HD picture quality without having to setup a bunch of thin stations. This would allow you to use HD TVs, but it might cost you some interactivity by not having a button to push. The advantage would be that the hardware to run this would not cost as much.
Currently, I use VLC to stream a channel that is on a loop from our headend to our customers because I don't want to have to deal with DVD's, etc.
http://aminocom.com/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html

Quicktime Alternative, FTW.. No iTunes, no iPhone, no iToilet...

Even better, VLC media player. Hardly a need to install anything! http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Install both, FTW (including Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which is bundled with Quicktime Alternative). MPC-HC and VLC use different decoding frameworks, so they don't interfere with each other. Some stuff works better on MPC-HC (hardware accelerated decoding) and some stuff works better on VLC (broken/incomplete files). However, Apple's Quicktime is definitely NOT needed to play back non-DRM's video on Windows.

I'd rather not get into a K-Lite vs CCCP war, but I prefer CCCP plus QT Lite.

Even better, VLC media player. Hardly a need to install anything! http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Surely VLC should have made this list?

The list was posted on a U.S. web site. VLC contains patented algorithms but doesn't come with a license to use the algorithms in the United States.

• VLC media player

That one times 1000000! So refreshing to find a media player that just *works* without endless pissing around.

Surely VLC should have made this list? While it isn't exactly pretty it is very much FOSS, cross platform, and removes the need to download endless quantities of random codecs. Definitely better that Media Player classic in my book.

How about a list of more apps?

• Calibre ebook manager
• Last.fm streaming music client
• VLC media player
• CDex CD ripping software
• MusicBrainz Picard for tagging audio files
• Pidgin IM client
• OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm
• VirtualDub for simple video editing

Anyone else have any good recommendations?

Try VLC, open source, works on OS X, Solaris and Windows too, does streaming, conversions,... Really rocks.VLC's website.

As a PC repairman I hate to break the news to y'all, but home users never update the damned PC. you could give them Apt and it would be just one more update they don't actually use. I have had machine come across my desk with 4+ year old copies of Norton AV (expired of course) and not a single update applied since it left the factory. That is just SOP for a good 90% of home users.

That is why my customers love me so much, because my motto is "do the thinking so they don't have to". So not only do I use Autopatcher to install all the current updates and have the latest service packs as well as set autoupdate for the OS, but I install Foxit set to autoupdate, have Spybot scheduled to autoupdate and scan, install Comodo AV/Firewall and have it set to scan on the customers schedule, install Firefox and set it to be the default browser, install the latest Flash and Shockwave and Java as well as Klite Mega codec pack so I don't have to worry about them downloading dodgy codecs, and finally install VLC Player which autoupdates and have it set as default video player.

While I don't get the return business of those that just reinstall and hand it to the customer to bone again I make up for that in referrals. But thinking something like Apt would be a silver bullet for home users is strictly a fantasy. First it would have to be run by MSFT to incorporate the Windows patches as well as third party updates, which would lead to vendors screaming and probably an antitrust investigation and I'm sure the EU would find a reason to have a shitfit, but then MSFT would get to deal with 3 or 4 years worth of lawsuits when they refuse to "provide" the myriad of programs that insist on installing toolbars or unrelated programs, like Java (toolbar) or iTunes (unrelated Safari and Quicktime).

So while having a central repository works for Linux, it simply would never work for Windows. Between trialware, crapware, toolbar installers, and unrelated installers you would either make it a one stop shop for crap which means the users would never allow it to run, or MSFT would spend the next decade in court for refusing to allow crapware into the repository. So sorry, it just wouldn't work.

Closed captions does work on this new version now. I worked with the VLC developers (Great guys) in the last couple months on getting this feature to work due to many misunderstanding between Subtitles and American Closed Captions. My friends and I have tested it in 1.0.0 and closed captions does work. Its under Subtitles > Closed Caption 1, 2, 3, 4 not a seperate Closed Captions option. Grab a movie that you know that has CC encoded in the video stream and try it out now. If you find movies that does not work in VLC with Closed Captions but you have tested on a regular DVD player or in a commerical verison, let me know the exact DVD info ASAP and I will pass it on to the VLC developers for more bug testing. VLC thread is here.... you would have to be a registered user to see this thread though. http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=57338

It still doesn't recognize when subtitles are encoded in some ANSI codepage (as most subtitles are) and displays question marks instead of special characters. VSFilter at least defaults to the system codepage. (A heuristic approach would be desirable, but AFAIK no player has that.) And still no support for downloading subtitles. Bug #899 was filed three years ago, nothing has happened since.

There is also Audio Description on some digital streams. Closed captions are supported in VLC but not apparently under Windows or BeOS. LOL

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

"... it is certainly stable playing MP4 profiles it supports..."

Agreed. And unstable or inoperable with other MP4 files. I'm told that even on the Mac, the free open source VLC Media player is often better.

Quicktime on the PC has been very buggy in my experience. That has given the entire trademark a negative connotation.

My original point was intended to be that Apple has damaged its reputation with its poor handling of Quicktime, in much the same way that Sun damaged its reputation with its poor handling of Java.

Thanks for clarifying some of the issues.

I've gotten the impression, possible in error, that the Quicktime code is so sloppy that the corporate will at Apple to fix it is just not there.

...weighs in on a controversial decision by Microsoft to block third party filter support in future versions of Windows media player."

For that reason lot's of people will stop using Window Media player and use VLC

Amarok 2 had a major release that consistently failed to build a proper library (randomly missing tracks depending on the phase of the moon during import, ugly problems with extracting metadata), was prone to crash, and relies on Phonon for which there doesn't seem to be a reliable backend (xine can't even seek in FLAC of WavPack, gstreamer integration is sketchy at best).

... which is pretty much it for multimedia...

All the cool kids already know the 2-word answer for this one: "veal" + "sea".

Too bad vlc wasn't part of their default software.

Yeah - too bad. Ever read about the legal use of this?

...there is not need to obtain any patent licenses for VideoLAN software within the European Union...

Is libdvdcss legal?

The use and distribution of the libdvdcss library is controversial in a few countries such as the United States because of a law called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). If you are unsure about the legality of using and distributing this library in your country, please consult your lawyer.

Beware: VLC media player binaries are distributed with the libdvdcss library included.

From http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html

You know - NASA - American tax dollars - legal. Or maybe it's NASA's job to have one of their lawyers figure out of it's OK. Or challenging the stupidity of the DCMA should have been part of the mission while they were just, ya know, tooling around, fixing the Hubble.

Yep - too bad it wasn't part of their default software.

Too bad vlc wasn't part of their default software.

You should have just installed VLC the first time.

He's talked about PSNR plenty of times as a way to compare implementations and codecs.

Feel free to point to them...

Let's see what a quick search turns up...

"Unsurprisingly, the encoder I develop for completely trashes every commercial solution I've put it against. I'm not sure whether this speaks for our effectiveness or that everyone else just sucks. Though my own research suggests its because everyone seems to think that PSNR == quality, which is a recipe for visual disaster."
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/9331/173944.aspx#173944

"x264's recent psy optimizations have proven quite definitively
that one can achieve greatly improved visual quality while decreasing
both PSNR and SSIM"
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2009-February/005624.html

Like Chrome or Internet Explorer 8 which have implemented this behavior to some degree, the main benefit would be the increase of stability: a single tab crash would not take down the whole session with it, as well as performance improvements in multiprocessor systems that are progressively becoming the norm.

While I believe this feature would improve Firefox in a big way, I also believe it was not badly needed at present because I have found Firefox to be pretty stable on all systems I have used it.

What I would have wanted to see is implementation of uniformity across all platforms especially Windows and Linux. Its user experience on Linux is still wanting from configuration options in unfamiliar places to that "old weird look and feel" one gets on the Linux platform.

Since QT 4.5 is not LGPL...how about re-creating its interface using QT like folks at VideoLan did. This would go a great way in improving the user experience.

I guess such a move would break compatibility with the thousands of extensions now available for Firefox, but folks, we must move on from time to time.

Am I wrong and unrealistic?

There are several close source counterparts that blow that clunky turd away.

Hahaha, haha, haha, ha. Oh, man. Like what?? Beat this list. And good luck playing encoded DVDs with your "counterparts". You suck even at trolling.

You mean like this? Or would you rather it have a "Click to install!" button?

Blame your distro if it makes that hard, but I do not think any of the popular distros have trouble with what you are describing.

If you visit their home page you'll find that they do have a new logo for 1.0. I don't know that the bulldozer is an improvement though.

!loof lirpA

If you visit their home page you'll find that they do have a new logo for 1.0. I don't know that the bulldozer is an improvement though.

!loof lirpA

I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.

VLC FAQ

Check your source : the FAQ mentions that VLC's use in the US is controversial.

Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes

Well, http://wiki.videolan.org/Mouse_Gestures then...

From your link:

left : Short time skip backward (10sec by default)
right : Short time skip forward (10sec by default)
left-up : Faster
right-up : Slower
left-down : Go to previous entry in playlist
right-down : Go to next entry in playlist
left-right : Play/Pause
right-left : Play/Pause
up : Volume up
down : Volume down
up-down : Mute Volume
down-up : Mute Volume
up-right : Change Audio track
down-right : Change Subtitle track
up-left : Enter fullscreen mode
down-left : Quit VLC

Hmm... They do ALL that and they can't add
"Single click: Play/pause"? Lame. I mean, obviously not everyone cares but it works REALLY well being able to click to pause in MPC. Gestures? Gestures are like the red-headed stepchild of interface methods - they are weird and people don't like them. Meanwhile, *clicking* the mouse, the thing it was designed to do, does nothing. I find this highly irritating.

And even if there is some way to force it, or make it work, or open some config file and change a line, why the hell isn't it standard!? It works well and fits right in where there is currently NO interface feature. It seems dead obvious to me and its simple things like that that make me question a project. Forget about pausing, who uses VLC and doesn't wish the trackbar expanded when you went full screen? I have a nice 1920x1080 TV and the trackbar is only like 600px wide. WTF? Try scrolling back 60 seconds in the godfather on a 600px wide trackbar 'cause your friend distracted you on a good part. That's damn tough, 60 seconds is only 3 pixels! if it were 1920 wide it would be 10px - tough but 3 times easier! I mean if this were a beta that would be fine but VLC has been around forever! I know they're still not at v1.0 but gmail is still in beta, so that's not always in indicator.

And the fact that it's more processor intensive than MPC? How many people are working on VLC that they can't even match MPC? MPC even streams better over a LAN at my place, which is funny because VIDEO LAN CLIENT should be better!
-Taylor

Maybe it's resolved since then, but if VLC wasn't concerned about its users then I wasn't going to waste more time on their behalf either. Album art downloads tend to do Google searches and download the first image returned. For at least some releases of VLC, this gets triggered for videos as well as audio. The end result is, every time I watch a video that I have on my local network, VLC advertises the fact that I am watching it. To the largest data mining company ever, Google. Unencrypted for anyone to see.

I posted a question to VLC forums, they seemed very unconcerned about this.

Somehow I enabled album art download. I don't remember doing it, but I am told it is off by default in every release so I did it, as opposed to VLC doing it automatically, so it's not necessarily a big deal. but I don't remember turning it on and had no way to know it was on until I got "out of disk space" errors and went looking for things to delete.

Anyway, more details here and read for yourselves.
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=55288&p=182407

Of course it does, but generally i keep my keyboard stowed when using my Media Center. The mouse is small so I keep it with the remotes

Well, http://wiki.videolan.org/Mouse_Gestures then...

VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.

Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.

The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.

DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.

FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.

CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.

Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.

MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.

I'd love to use VLC legally in the US, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen any time soon.

VLC FAQ

That's just stupid, and I suspect that you know it.

VLC works on all those platforms, and plays these files fine.