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Microsoft Ends Windows Media Player on the Mac
alphasubzero949 writes "According to News.com, Microsoft has had no plans to update or improve Windows Media Player and has instead thrown its weight behind a third party plugin to fill the void. Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, told News.com, 'It's basically a business decision for Microsoft. Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.'"
Windows Media Player was not a product that MacBU made, it was sorely lacking in almost every respect and laughing stock of the entire Mac community. It won't be missed. The QuickTime plugin Flip4Mac is better in almost every respect and enabled transcoding to the plethora of formats that QuickTime offers. However.. the free plugin does not enable a Mac user to encode WMV. You'll have to pay for that.
:)
One interessting thing here is that Flip4Mac licenses technology from MS that MS now are paying to get back
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
No, hence the name Third party plugin
Lucky you! http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/flip4mac.mspx. They've provided a way to keep watching.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/flip4mac.mspx
Check out the page. It lets Quicktime play wmv. I don't believe it's originally made by MS (not sure) but they are distributing a basic playback version for free. There's a more advanced version that lets one edit video streams as well. This is very cool, and better than dealing with the WMV player for Mac... Almost as annoying as Quicktime client for windows. Any way--mac, windows, linux/*bsd...I use mplayer or vlc. The odd wmv is the only thing I use wmv for, and this appears to solve that need.
This is actually a huge upgrade and great news for Mac users.
Try upgrading to 2.0.1, just released. There was a crashing problem in 2.0 and Quicktime 7.0.4 when you leave the video (navigate away, quit Quicktime, etc).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
VLC.
I love it to death. It does everything quicktime should do.
videolan.org
A blog about stuff.
No, you definitely do not have to pay $45. Just play the video in iTunes, or mplayer, or VLC. Who told you that Quicktime was the only was to play videos?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Flip4mac is nifty, but it's got some serious usability issues.
.wmv file, quicktime player doesn't pull up as a valid option to open the file.
1. if you right-click on a
2. playback is fine, but navigating within the file is problematic - trying to skip to the middle of a file usually results in the 'counter keeps ticking, but the video and audio freezes' problem.
3. opening files can (but doesn't always) take forever, and it has nothing to do with the size of the file.
4. it's a good stopgap, but it still chokes on the occasional file - one in ten or so.
Not saying it's not an interesting project, but it's not the holy grail either. I find that VLC is, if not as dependable (flip4mac opens files that VLC routinely chokes on) at least more flexible if it manages to open the file in the first place.
The crash in Quicktime 7.0.4 is fixed by the update at http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htm (Flip4Mac 2.0.1). It seems to be just an update, so you need to get and install Flip4Mac 2.0.0 from Microsoft first.
I am the first to admit that I had no idea I could even get WMP for my PowerBook.
However, I'm not sure there is a void that needs filling.
MplayerOSX has always worked great for playing anything on my Mac that Quicktime couldn't handle.
Not that I'm concerned about over-stressing MS's servers while we all look for the latest version, but in the spirit of karma whoring...
http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htmQuicktime format is open, as long as you use an open codec in it. I personally like MMPEG-4 for my streaming work.
Mod point free since 2001
But for the long term the best format is of course MPEG 4 (AVC or ASP) in a standard MPEG 4 (.mp4) container file.
Actually, the Quicktime container format is open. In fact, you can download a document describing the format from Apple's Quicktime developer website. It's the codecs that may or may not be closed. In fact, .mp4 files are Quicktime files. They're just Quicktime files with the .mov extension changed to .mp4 and are limited to using the MPEG 4 codecs. I believe the MP4 container also drops some of Quicktime's more advanced features, like sprites, but I could be wrong about that one.
In general, the problem with computer video is that most codecs are embroiled with patents. It's pretty much impossible to create a free video player that supports all video formats, because a large number of codecs require royalty payments. In fact, by using VLC in the U.S., you're probably breaking the law. If you want to be legal with your use of VLC, go visit the FFMPEG web site. There you can find a section about which parts of the FFMPEG library are implementations of proprietary codecs and who you should contact to license those portions.
Thankfully, most of those patent holders aren't coming after VLC or FFMPEG. However, try using FFMPEG in a commercial product and see how long before the lawyers come knocking at your door.
Oh, I'm not actually using the format since it is so bad. Doesn't mean that I don't want to. Unfortunately Windows Media is the only format MLB offers their archives in. Fortunately Real is a working alternative for live broadcasts (and it works surprisingly well) but in the off-season I am pretty much hosed with my mac. The first time I heard of this third-party plugin I was quite enthusiastic, but it didn't work. I just tried again and it still doesn't work for the one thing I need it.
It's a shame, really, since it's such a nice service in theory, but what can you do? Now that WMP on mac is dead I can hope that baseball gets its act together and starts offering the archived games in an alternative format. Real would be enough, but of course I'd be happy with quicktime too.
Hank! White!
Messenger is basically unnecessary, because there are third-party products that do what it does (MSN support) better, and with better system integration. Messenger as it exists right now would have been a fine program in 2002, but today it's lame. Plus, very few Mac users I know want to only use MSN for Instant Messenging, and that's what the program is geared to. Most people who want to talk to people who use MSN are going to use Adium or one of the other multi-protocol IM clients.
There might be a small niche of users who haven't discovered the joy that is Adium (I'm now a total convert since they built in Address Book integration and encryption) and are still using the standalone MSN client, but I think they'll find that they're better off once they make the switch to another product.
The real MS product that it would be detrimental to the Mac platform to lose is Entourage. Without that, I can't think of an easy way to interact with an Exchange Server (Apple Mail will do the email part, but it won't do the calendaring or PIM functions). Granted I think Exchange is stupid, but it's popular.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
QuickTime plays avi's just fine.
Er, no it doesn't.
It's not really Quicktime's fault, but has something to do with either how AVI deals with MP3 audio tracks, or how people put MP3 audio into them. I've never been entirely clear.
But the great majority of Divx AVIs that you download (theoretically, or so I'm told, by some guy down at the 7-11 who knows such things) will not play in Quicktime "off the shelf." You'll get a black screen and no audio, or sometimes you'll get video and no audio, or desynced audio and video.
The fix is to run them through a little program called "Divx Doctor," which takes the AVI as an input and produces a Quicktime MOV file, either standalone or as a pointer to the content of the AVI, that you can play with. They work just fine.
Or you can just play the AVIs as-is in VLC, which also has the benefit of supporting playlists and some WMV codecs.
Quicktime technically has the ability to play AVIs, but it's a useless feature because of the way that 90% of the ones you'll find online are put together (Divx video with MP3 audio).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Research before you talk. The Quicktime file format is fully documented, and Apple's licensing is quite open. According to Digital Preservation, "Licensing by Apple appears to be limited to the software and other technology elements." The Wikipedia entry on Quicktime claims that the "the QuickTime file format itself [is] openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free."
If you want to be very sure, you could always ask Apple directly, via their Quicktime Software Licensing page (which is related more to bundling actual Quicktime software with products, and using the Quicktime and Apple logo). Their email address is sw.license@apple.com.
That said, here's the actual Apple documentation for the Quicktime File Format, from the developer site. I think this is what you'd want; in its introduction it reads "if you are developing a non-QuickTime application that imports QuickTime files or works with QuickTime VR, you need to understand the material in this book."
So basically, it's nothing like the situation with ASF or WMV at all. Apple has lots of reasons to want people to implement the Quicktime file format -- in digital cameras, third-party software, wherever. A version of it is used in the ISO spec for MPEG-4 video, as well. The more people use it, the more interoperable Macs become; to encourage that, the spec is open. Obviously there are licensing issues on the codecs themselves, but in terms of the container format there don't seem to be any deal-breaking restrictions. It's only if you wanted to use Apple code to play the content of the containers/streams, or use any of their logos that there'd be a problem.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The Quicktime application itself is the only thing locked out -- the underlying API for playing back video and such is not. For example you can download NicePlayer, which will utilize Quicktime and allow you to play back video full screen and such, without needing you to pay for a Quicktime pro key. Since it uses the Quicktime APIs, it fully supports the use of flip4mac for playing back wmv. It also provides a pluggable back end so you can download separate plugins if you'd rather use something like Xine to render the video. NicePlayer even plays back DVDs, and it has a far better interface than both Quicktime player and DVD Player.
the basic, "free", QT client doesn't even support full screen mode
The free client also doesn't support file conversion and export...barbaric, I know, but that's just the method Apple use to encourage some to pay for it.
You could of course try one of the free alternative players that do give you full screen:
Echidna Movie Viewer (296KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/6068
Fullscreen Movie Player (926KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11670
LittleView (208KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20230
Movie Time (176KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14774
Nice Player (672KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15136
Playlist Player (202KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9442
PresentMovie: (14KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7534
QT Full Screen (92KB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19158
QTAmateur (77K) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18278
QuikTime FS (17K) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16959
Xinema (1MB) http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10767
And that's just the search results from one site, I'm sure there are more out there. You could trash the QuickTime Player and relace it with any of those, because unlike Real and WMV, QuickTime codecs are available to any software that uses the relevant APIs (which is why these programs are so small: the codecs are already in the OS, so they just contain interface components. They'll even play WMVs if you have the third-party codec installed).
WMV on Mac is better than QuickTime on Mac. It shouldn't be, but it is. It does what it's supposed to do. Performance is excellent.
I don't know about you, but for me "performance" means being able to jump forwards and backwards on the timeline and see more than black screen (the third party WMV codecs for QuickTime can do this, why can't Microsoft manage it?); even my old VHS has a functional "fast forward" button. I'd take that over the minor inconvenience of a tiny fraction of my screen being taken up by window edges any day (not that its really an issue for me, since I do use the export features of QTPro its worth paying for it). And I can't say I'm impressed by WMP's audio at any data rate.
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