Talk:Comparison of video player software

Yahoo! Music Jukebox vs Musicmatch Jukebox

Are these the same or different products? Has Musicmatch been discontinued? JMJimmy (talk) 19:58, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Pounds to dollars

Can someone convert the pounds to dollars and for the dollars, can someone state the currency? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hubew (talk • contribs) 14:28, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

MMS protocol support

The mms (= microsoft media stream) protocol support should be partial for most of the players. For instance there is no working seek (fast forward, rewind, goto 50%, ...) in mplayer and xine at least. And my guess is that the most of the other players will fail the seek test as well, because its very hard to implement. Only players I know that do seek are MS media player and vlc. The seek property is a must for playing internet streams, because if your connection breaks you cannot continue where you left and have to start all over again. 88.195.116.109 (talk) 18:53, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Amarok filetypes support

At first amarok can't play any audio (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/FAQ#What_media_types_does_Amarok_support.3F) it is using backends - xine, helix and NMM, so why according to this article xine can play audio files that amarok can't? Aaron LoveP 22:20, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Anyway, there is 2 Amarok entries in the "Protocol Support" table -- Pior 23 Sept 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.52.210.68 (talk) 20:27, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

WMP free video not

Windows and WMP do NOT come with a free video decoder, and so are NOT able to play video, free.-69.87.203.181 20:35, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't WMP play MPEG1, WMV7, WMV8 and WMV9 (VC1) out of the box? --CE 192.35.241.121 18:26, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

DVD Menu

Does the player display the menu of a DVD or not? This is a very important minor question!

Container formats

I think RealMedia container format should be added to the comparison. 88.196.38.179 21:16, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Quicktime and mp4 are the same, real media should be in there. --Compn 20:21, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Bloatware analysis?

How about some statistic on how fast each player is? I know this kind of thing is hard to rate, but it also happens to be one of the most useful aspects of defining a video player. Perhaps, attempting to run the five most popular video formats through each one?

Also the size of the install should also be a factor, again as another statistic, as well as how fast the program loads. --Skytopia 14:45, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Zoom, speed, frame step stats...

More important statistics which this excellent page doesn't yet offer would include:

1: Zoom options (such as, touch border from inside/outside, ignore aspect ratio). 2: Frame step (backwards and forwards, preferably with cursor keys) 3: Speed of play (not time or pitch stretch, just basic speed up/slow down - the sound as well as video would go proportionally faster/slower). --Skytopia 14:50, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Aspect Ratio - more important that which allow ignoring it, which players support it (i.e. notice aspect ratio is set and respect it). Cefu (talk) 18:12, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

SACD

Shouldn't SACD be deleted? The wikipedia article claims there are no drives for PC hardware, so how should any software play this back? --CE 192.35.241.121 18:26, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Removed --CE 192.35.241.121 (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Page layout

A couple of things:

1. Why, for the first four sections, are audio and video players in separate tables, but not the other sections? We should do one or the other. Personally I would prefer that we had separate tables for all sections.
2. Any objections to making all tables sortable?
3. For the features set, wouldn't it be better to group the two audio tables and two video tables together. So instead of V1, A1, V2, A2 it would go V1, V2, A1, A2.
4. Wouldn't it be helpful to mention if it can rip CDs to mp3/ogg/whatever? Either have a single yes/no column in the features section for if it can rip to anything, or another table with a column for each of various formats. Koweja (talk) 04:29, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

1. I concur, either that or two separate sections altogether, with subsections. Maybe with the exception of the 'General' section?
2. Can't really see a reason not to.
3. I believe this would be preferable over how it is now.
4. How about, one section for formats it can write to and add 'disc media' riping and streaming media riping to the features section? --Execvator (talk) 09:52, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

FLV player(s)

The link to FLV Player has many external links, none of which are GPL-licensed. Hence, I am changing its entry to "Proprietary". FSHero (talk) 18:30, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Last.fm

In audio player features a Last.fm column should be included. If you really want same size tables, then move one column from features (continued) to features and add Last.fm and Gerpok to features (continued) for example. —Preceding unsigned comment added by BerVi (talk • contribs) 16:01, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Use of "Free" to describe Xware

It is this user's opinion that adware is not free. Bloatware, nagware, crippleware, and the like are also not free. They are not libre(free as in free speech), as they lack vital features, may have malicious effects, restrict what you can do with them, or do things without the users explicit consent. Implicit consent clauses in the license, i.e a screen that shows up after you have already downloaded or finished installing it and says "if you download or install this, you agree to forfeit all of your rights and your eternal soul to the developer", are legally dubious/ethically indefensible and are not considered to be "consent" by this user in this context. They are not gratis(free as in free beer), as their only purpose is to make money from advertisements, or to make you buy the paid version. Also, bloatware that fills the hard disks of new computers, adware and the additional infectious agents invariably carried in served ads, and repeated nag screens in programs, can take hours to mitigate, and sometimes cannot be entirely removed. Time is money- those hours spent dealing with it, if spent working even at US minimum wage, would amount to enough to actually purchase a full software product, maybe several. Even if the developer receives no profit, you still pay when using these programs.

This user suggests changing the software labeled "free" but also having a paid version or having unwanted behaviors be relabeled. Possible options include "demo", "*ware" where * is a descriptor of its limitations or negative behavior, "crippled trial", "limited functionality" etc. I have not used most of the players listed, so I can not make claims about individual programs. It is the nature of tiered software to sell the user up to the next tier, but I recognize that there may be software that does this without using these tactics, so each item should be changed by people who have used the program personally.

Also, Windows Media Player communicates with the internet and Microsoft without the user's explicit consent, collecting identifiable information and tracking usage, has integration with music stores and other paid services that cannot be removed as well as occasionally interfering with other uses, and I personally suspect the software as a whole may be downright spyware. Also, it is my opinion that it should be listed not as "windows-license needed" but as "WGA protected" with WGA linked to the appropriate page, since this more specifically and concisely describes it.

In conclusion, my neutrality on the topic is obviously compromised, therefore no changes have been/will be made by this user. Moonlightfox (talk) 00:31, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Seconded. Free is incorrect verbiage, many of the products listed as free are in fact marketware. and Wikipedia should not recognize malware products beyond identifying them as such. I think you're a bit too paranoid about WMP though. They can't be THAT evil, they're just microsoft. 71.87.24.2 (talk) 10:56, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Auto Resume for iTunes

I don't know if anybody knows this (maybe you all use something other than iTunes) but iTunes has an auto resume for podcasts and individual media files and has had it for a while now. Not DVDs, but it certainly has it for video files and audio files. And automatically adds that capability to podcasts when it downloads the podcasts. You can get to this option for individual files by right clicking on a song or video file and choosing "Get Info" and in one of the tabs (I'm not sure which since I'm not on Windows right now. I think it's the Playback tab) it'll let you check a box next to an option for that.--FazzMunkle (talk) 22:52, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

HD DVD and Blu-Ray

Is it necessary to have columns for HD DVD and BluRay if none of the players support them? Perhaps it would be better to have a note at the end to the effect of: "None of these players currently supports playback of HD DVDs or BluRay disks." Matt White (talk) 19:48, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

VLC

I thought VLC was also an audio player... shouldn't it be under the audio player section as well? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.170.53.118 (talk) 23:09, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Read the "definition" at the top of the article. --Execvator (talk) 13:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Flac and Cuesheet support

What player does support Flac files with embedded cue sheets?--92.229.174.58 (talk) 08:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

See the metadata support section. --Execvator (talk) 21:28, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Cue sheet and embedded cue sheet support are quite different. Also, there are multiple ways to embed cue sheets, not all of which are compatible with one another.74.215.119.104 (talk) 13:21, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Software Not listed

• JavaTunes 93.96.115.80 (talk) 10:05, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
• Miro?

Why isn't Miro in this list? 89.214.25.177 (talk) 23:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

because it's too much of a pain in the ass to add anything. article is a total mess —Preceding unsigned comment added by Petchboo (talk • contribs) 20:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

• Apollo

What's about Apollo? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.179.38.88 (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Redundancy in video player table

Do we really need to state that every video player has video playback in the features table? Dan (talk) 05:02, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Nero ShowTime

I would be interested in knowing how Nero ShowTime compares with the rest of the players. Thanks. SharkD (talk) 06:13, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Double Fail

by placing video and audio players on the same page, some wiki-nazi has saved one page, and made this one useless. double score!

This really needs to be split into 2 pages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.137.177.241 (talk) 01:38, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Link to Listen media player broken

Leads back to this page, lolwut? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.166.138.88 (talk) 10:20, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Kantaris

FFplay is distributed in source form and can either be compiled as a GPL binary, or an LGPL binary. Kantaris is distributed in binary form, so is must be either GPL or LGPL. Since the programmer claims that his software is GPL and LGPL (if one uses the installer, the also distributed run-alone binary simply contains no license statement which already infringes libavcodec's copyrights) at the same time which is impossible, because the GPL explicitely forbids this. --62.178.80.242 (talk) 09:54, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Amarok does not run on Windows yet

As stated on the Amarok download page:

http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Windows

"Please be aware that no stable version of Amarok for Windows has yet been released. This means those builds are FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY. There is no official support for them. Those builds might be unstable, have bad side effects, kill your cat, start WW4 or might even not work at all. You have been warned!"

I've downloaded and installed Amarok 2.0.1.1 on WinXP32 SP3 and it crahes on startup, so I don't cosider this Windows Operating support, yet. That's why I'll change it to not yet in the list. --Kobelix (talk) 09:12, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Secondary/dual subtitles

The information about support for secondary subtitles could be included in subtitles support section. As far as I know this feature is implemented in The KMPlayer and PowerDVD. Eresus (talk) 04:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Feature to filter the Comparison Table

It would be great if Wikipedia had a function to filter the table by keywords. For example i want be able filter for players that are "open source" and run on "Linux" and than Wikipedia should create a new page with only these players, that have this feature. --78.43.182.114 (talk) 04:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

A-B Repeat Unavailable on Several Players

The players Kaffeine, KMPlayer, and Smplayer were marked as having A-B repeat available, but I've examined their menus and key-shortcuts and can't find that feature, so I've flipped the feature boxes from yes to no. I could be wrong, but before anybody changes them back to yes, please state where that feature is found on the player. --Farry (talk) 19:30, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Fluendo DVD Player missing

Just want to say Fluendo DVD Player is missing from this article... SF007 (talk) 12:01, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Zune Software Missing

Just wondering why the Zune Software is not on the list, it's both a Audio and video player and can be used as a standalone app.

15:41, 1 August 2009 (GMT) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.205.29.33 (talk)

VPlayer subtitles format

VPlayer subtitles format (.sub) should be added, it is text based subtitle format which unfortunately is still in use by some people today, (very latest XBMC builds from SVN for example supports this subtitle format now). 83.227.151.27 (talk) 12:20, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

New player: Moovida Why isn't it on the list.

I haven't tried it already, but it seems to be able to play and display almost everything, so I think it's worth adding it to this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Impocta (talk • contribs) 13:51, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Criteria for inclusion

Is there a criteria for inclusion on this list? There have been complaints to the length of it going back a long time. If the list of players was culled to remove non-notable and legacy players, it might be a lot more manageable. Miami33139 (talk) 19:25, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Trimming the "general" chart

The columns author, data, and version do not actually do anything to compare between any media players. The information is readily available by clicking through the players article. Any reason to keep those? Miami33139 (talk) 23:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Split page

Okay, we're way beyond recommended article length at this point. We should probably move all the audio tables to their own article. Chris Cunningham 11:48, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

My vote is no. The articles would be too specific then. Yes, a disambiguation page would help, but that kills the whole point of splitting up the page. BlueCanary9999 16:54, 22 September 2007 (UTC)BlueCanary9999

i agree with splitting the page into audio and video pages Acasperw 12:04, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree with splitting audio and video, but "split into multiple articles accessible from a disambiguation page" seems a bit unnecessary. That would spoil the whole point of having a comparison page. Isn't that what categories are for? GeiwTeol 22:36, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

What part of "move all the audio tables to their own article" do you guys not understand? That sounds reasonable to me. SamB (talk) 01:21, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, unless audio players have features exclusive to themselves, I don't think it's an absolute must to split the article. --Jw21/PenaltyKillah ^{VANucks|17-12-3} 20:56, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

From a user's perspective I vote no. Consider this: many of the video players also play plain audio files. The resulting audio page would either end up about half as long as the current setup, or just as long to include the audio capabilities of the video players, and then the video page would either be nearly as long as the current article, or lose half of the relevant data! Therefore, in the end it would be a large net increase in the size of the article across the two pages accompanied by a hit to ease of use and organization. I say reorganize the list into a more compact and efficient format(by sacrificing or simplifying the OS compatibility list, for instance), and leave it one article.Moonlightfox (talk) 01:22, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I do not think this article should be split!

Having all this information in one place is rare and should be maintained —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.168.121.231 (talk) 03:12, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I think this article should be kept in its current form. However, I suggest that other articles be added in addition to this one. If someone is looking for a video player, the audio player tables are useless, but not too difficult to skip over. If someone is looking for an audio player, there is a lot of interspersed information about features only applicable to video players, which is much harder to ignore if not relevant. For example, time-stretching obviously applies to both, but colour controls do not. However, some video-players may support e.g. time-stretching only on audio or only on video (becoming out-of-sync), and that would further complicate the table with features that do apply to both. I realize this would be harder to maintain, but I believe it makes it more user-friendly. Kaldosh (talk) 08:52, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I do not think the audio and video should be seperated but the tables should be on seperate pages from a disam. page. i.e. one for the audio features, one for vid features, one for the OS list, one for format support, and so on. 71.87.24.2 (talk) 10:51, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I would also say "No". I came specifically looking for a media player which would handle both video and audio. (I have several "music videos" in my collection.) Having lists for both features on the same page is handy. Kf7xm (talk) 17:42, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I vote "No", too. I totally agree with the guy above me ("From a user's perspective..."). 85.127.158.255 (talk) 16:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Why not split it into three pages... ? Video, Audio & Hybrid? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.125.233.49 (talk) 04:23, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Isn't that going to result in a fair amount of duplication of data, and with the problem of version drift - ie, some piece of data is changed on one page but not another. And we will need a full alphabetical, or by OS, or both, table of contents page (or disambiguation page) so that people can find the player they are interested in. Seems like a lot of work to set up and to maintain properly. Also we loose the comparison feature across all players. Not dead set against it, just pointing out potential problems. In either case, the page needs work, although I'm leaning more towards keeping it as one article. — Becksguy (talk) 05:18, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

This is my first edit in Wikipedia, so please be patient. While I understand the potential problems associated with splitting the page, right now it just seems bloated. And I think part of the problem is that, as others have pointed out, many players play both audio and video content. So...option (1) would be to split the page into two, with one page concentrating on video players and the other concentrating on audio players. In the video page, there could be an additional column to indicate whether the player also played audio files (if yes, the "yes" would link to the audio page); in the audio page, there could be an additional column to indicate whether the player also played video files (again with links). Option (2) would be to leave all the info in one page, taking out the alternating headers of "video" and "audio." Just say what features the various players have, and this would obviously include whether the player handled audio files, video files, or both. I guess that's what bothers me about the page as it is--by splitting the page into "video" and "audio" sections, it begs either to be split or to be rewritten.... Personally, I favor option (1), as I tend to be more interested in audio than video, but that's just me. :-) Ddgdrs (talk) 18:48, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, as far as I know, every video player has got audio playback capabilities. Also, you have things like Media Database and Skins that doesn't really fit in either category. So, as I see it, you either split the article right of with only media players capable of video playback in the video players article and the rest in the audio players article; or you make video player and audio player the main categories in this article and the current main categories are placed as sub-categories to them. I don't really care either way, as long as you get the ability to actually see what part of the article someone has edited... --Execvator (talk) 12:12, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

• I vote no. "Comparison Of" pages need to be as long as they need to be in order to be complete. And splitting audio off is artificial- there are very few video-only devices; almost all have audio too. If anything, we should probably consolidate pages like Comparison of portable media players should be brought into this one (Comparison of media players is rather general). --ClariT (talk) 00:28, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

The page has already been split in the sense that audio and video exist in their own separate tables. The page also looks messy from the point that tables throughout the entire article are inconsistent. As of the "Protocol Support" section audio and video players exist in one large table (as opposed to two tables featured earlier in the article) separated by a non-obvious row listed as "Audio Players" which then just duplicates the headers/column tiles. Also from a readers point of view there is too much scrolling involved to compare just video or audio players. If the page is not to be split then it needs redesigning so that the audio players sit at the side of video players (as opposed to the current layout, where the audio follows video, follows audio, follows video etc). As the tables do not fit in a single window (require scrolling, even at 1440x900) it can some time get confusing as to which table you are looking at, either audio or video. Smillie-world (talk) 10:05, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

How about we don't make any distinction between "audio players" and "video players"? Doing this we could also just leave out any players that don't have video playback capabilities in that specific table and note this in the article. As for the splitting, I personally like how Comparison of layout engines is handled. Perhaps we could have a main Comparison of media players and sub pages like Comparison of media players (playback) where you would find comparisons for audio format support, video format support and container format support and another sub page Comparison of media players (hardware) with Optical media publication support and things like remote controllers and so on. --Execvator (talk) 11:57, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Split page continued

• Now leaning more towards splitting the pages, considering the size of the article. Still need to be careful of data drift between the two pages (for the data or table formatting that is common between them). Also, we will loose the ability to easily compare audio features between audio only players and players that do both. — Becksguy (talk) 11:14, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I made the proposal to split along the audio and video player software as the article in its current form is basically unmaintainable and extremely difficult to use. Likely the thing to do will be to split either the audio or video player software content into a separate article and rename this one. --Tothwolf (talk) 12:52, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Page splitted

I splitted the page. The video-part today and the audio-part a month ago. Template:Media_player_(application_software) fits also already. So now what we do with this page? --Txt.file (talk) 12:13, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Please delete: If not, all three pages will be edited differently.--62.178.80.242 (talk) 12:47, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

GMPC - Gnome Music Player Client

missing this player http://gmpc.wikia.com/wiki/Gnome_Music_Player_Client--195.60.133.246 (talk) 16:35, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Revert war

First, let me state that I often disagreed with User:Miami33139 about his last changes: I seriously doubt his claim to be an inclusionist and I think it is sad that TAK is not mentioned anymore on Wikipedia. The changes of User:Tothwolf however, that were made without any discussion, are absolutely inacceptable and should be reverted. (As can be seen, I can't do that.) CE--62.178.80.242 (talk) 12:35, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

If I overwrote any information that had been added since Miami33139 removed a large number of entries, point out which entry is affected and I'll correct it. I tried not to lose any corrections or improvements to other entries while restoring other entries and content but due to the complex markup is is always easy to overlook something. --Tothwolf (talk) 14:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

The article is excessively long and had complaints it needed to be reduced for years. Even splitting into two articles leaves two articles with too many entries. It is so long it is difficult to edit, I'm forced to open it it an IDE because of the number of separate lines. Enforcing a simple inclusion criteria helps this and had no complaints for a month. Miami33139 (talk) 17:31, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Edit it in an external editor like everyone else. Complex markup doesn't work well with the default web based markup editor. This is a known issue; usability.wikimedia.org
As for the real reason you wish to specifically remove material related to media player software (and have since tried to involve yourself in other software issues to hide what you were really doing, and going as far as to take "revenge" on editors who went against your deletion efforts), I'm well aware of what you are up to and you need to take your conflict of interest and paid editing elsewhere. While the community might have initially been slow to notice what you were doing and connect the dots, I'm not the only one who knows the details now and it will no longer fly. It is now pointless for your to continue your recent Hail Mary play that you began after the ArbCom case was filed as anything you can do (including deletion nominations) can be undone and fixed by the community. As YTCracker said not too terribly long ago; kick rocks. --Tothwolf (talk) 19:14, 11 December 2009 (UTC)