Media Players

The Lowdown

This morning’s show (I do a regular spot on ABC Radio) was on media players (it also featured me saying how good looking I am and accusing the host (Peter Gooch) of wearing a dress but that’s a story for another time!).

A media player is simply a piece of software that will play audio and video files. Audio and video come in lots of different formats as companies have developed their own proprietary way of doing this to try and gain a market advantage.

(Having said that, there are things called codec files that can help convert file formats to the format you need.)

Standard Formats

There are a few standard sort of formats (wav and mp3 for audio, avi for video) that all media players will read. Most media players read the vast majority but not all players play all formats – but that doesn’t matter too much because the vast majority of audio and video online is in a format that the major media players will read.

Media player developers try and outdo each other with added features to try and encourage you to use their player – these sort of features includes a way to manage you files/songs, whilst others have features such as CD burning and extended controls.

Some media players charge an upgrade fee of about $20 US to get access to more features (I generally find the free versions are suitable for the vast majority of people).

The Main Media Players

The main players are as following:

Windows Media Player
Quicktime
Real Player
iTunes
Winamp

Hope that is of some help.