Media players galore
For better or worse, multimedia files have a large and growing presence on the Web. Unfortunately, there is no one format that everybody uses. Many sites use Adobe Flash for video because the files are more compact and almost everyone has a Flash plug-in for their browser or can easily download one. However, Windows Media Player, RealMedia, and QuickTime formats are also common. Each requires a separate player or plug-in. To make matters more complicated, a large variety of compression methods exist so a given format may still require a bunch of different codecs in order to play all files. There are also other less common formats.
In other words, if you like to watch or listen to a lot of multimedia files on the Web, you need a battery of software. Windows comes with Media Player but both RealPlayer and QuickTime have to be downloaded and installed separately. Both are on my list of most disliked software. Steve Bass gives some alternatives to RealPlayer. I have previously mentioned an alternative QuickTime player.
One way around some of the format and codec problems is a universal player that can handle a variety of formats. One that I have sometimes used is VLC Media Player. You may still have to deal with RealMedia and QuickTime files separately, however.
If you have a favorite multimedia player or source of codecs, let us know.
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