gHacks technology news » media-player

Windows Media Player Import for Winamp

Martin — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:22:14 +0000

Windows Media Player and Winamp are two of the most popular media players that come with a large feature set that include playing various video and audio formats or media management capabilities. Users who want to transfer their multimedia collection from Windows Media Player to Winamp now have the possibility to automate the process with the help of the free Windows Media Player Import software program for the Windows operating system.

Winamp by default comes with the option to import the iTunes media library. It does however not include a similar option to import media from Windows Media Player which is why the software program has been created by the developer.

The application can import the Windows Media Player library into Winamp. This includes audio and videos files, all metadata including ratings and play counts.

The software comes with a few options to customize the import of the Windows Media Player library. It is possible to import all media files or only audio or video files. There is also an option to only import audio and video from an existing playlist.

Three additional options are available. It is possible to ignore files that are already in the Winamp Media Library, remove files from the Winamp Media Library that are not in the Windows Media Player Library and to automatically import on Winamp startup.

The program will not make any changes to Windows Media Player no matter which settings are selected in the application.

Windows Media Player Import is available at the developer’s website. It requires Windows 2000 or higher (means it is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7), Winamp 5 or higher and Windows Media Player 9 or higher.

Tags: audio, media-player, music, video, winamp, winamp library, windows media player, windows media player import, windows media player library, windows software

VLC Media Player 1.0 Released

Martin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:34:24 +0000

The VideoLan team today announced the release of version 1.0.0 of their popular media player VLC Media Player. The major release introduces many few features, formats and codecs to VLC and fixes a high number of bugs that were present in previous versions of the media player.

The changelog lists all of the changes and additions that the developers have packed into the new release of the VLC Player including live recording, finer speed controls, new HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, Real video 3.0 and 4.0), formats, video scaling in full screen or zipped file playback. VLC Media Player can still play most video and audio formats out of the box without needing third party codec installations to do so.

VLC Player is still cross platform which means that the new release is available for all supported operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OSX and Linux. Users can download the new release directly from the developer’s website.

A viable alternative is SMPlayer which uses less resources than VLC Player while providing most of the benefits.

Tags: linux software, mac software, media-player, movie player, Open Source, video-player, vlc, vlc media player, windows software

How do you use your media player?

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:07:50 +0000

Following up on last week’s much commented article about how you guys use your Firefox, I decided to also take a look at how you use your media player applications. This is perhaps a bit more complex than last week’s question, since we are covering multiple applications. Nevertheless, which media player do you use, and how?

I have been using a lot of different ones over the years, but I never really came to like any of them because I either missed features, found them too complicated to use, and I never ever managed to maintain a we ll organized collection, especially with ratings.

I have used Foobar, Media Monkey Winamp, iTunes, and just as in last weeks post, I returned to the most simple one, Windows Media Player 11.Yes, Foobar is simpler, but it is a pain to get to look nice and WMP 11 is built in from the start. I actually like Media Player 11 a lot, I thnk it looks great and handles great, although there could be better features, and frankly, it’s video capabilities are really bad, but I like it for music. So, how do you use your media player?

Tags: media, media-player, music

Windows Media Player CD-Text

Martin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:08:33 +0000

CD-Text stores additional information on a audio CD. The information consist usually of the album, name, song name, track info and artist. Many computer music players like Winamp or MediaMonkey can read CD-Text and display the information. Instead of playing track 1 the user would actually see the track name and related information.

Windows Media Player never officially supported CD-Text which is where WMPCDText comes into play. The plugin for Windows Media Player 10 or 11 is capable of reading and displaying CD-Text information in Windows Media Player.

The Windows Media Player plugin comes with an option to automatically load the CD-Text information if present on the CD. The alternative would be to right-click on the tracks of the CD to load the CD-Text information into Windows Media Player.

This obviously only works with CDs that make use of CD-Text information. Many burning software programs can burn CD-Text including Nero, ImgBurn or iTunes. The Windows Media Player plugin will run on Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista with administrative rights required on XP and 2003.

Tags: cd-text, cd-text plugin, media player plugin, media-player, windows media player, windows media player plugin, WMPCDText

Adobe Media Player

Martin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:53:15 +0000

My first though was “Oh no, not another media player”. Adobe Media Player is based on the Adobe Air plattform which has to be installed before the media player can be installed.Think of flash for the desktop and you are more or less there. The interior of the media player reminds me a lot about Joost or Bablegum. Users can select prerecorded shows that they can watch with the majority of content looking to be from independent publishers and only some well known tv-shows and publishers on board at the moment with CBS and MTV probably the biggest currently.

The Adobe Media Player is divided into two key areas. The first are the Genres like Documentary or News that loads a list of shows that can be watched in that category. All the shows are prerecorded so don’t expect to be able to watch tonights shows live in the player.The genres do not contain the shows of the networks, or not all of them which is kinda confusing.

If you want to watch the latest episode of CSI for instance you have to click on networks > CBS > CSI and select the show in that menu. You cannot click on the Entertainment category or Drama (which is not existing) to access the show.

The image quality is surprisingly good and can be compared to that of Hulu, far better than the image quality of Youtube for instance. The interface however feels a little bit sluggish, it always takes a second or so before the next menu is showing up which would be fine for a web application but not for a desktop player.

There is no country restriction currently in place. This means everyone from all over the world may watch the latest episodes of Jericho, CSI or The Hills. You will see advertisement though. The Adobe Media Player will be popular with networks and content creators because of its ad displaying capabilities. It is not limited to in video ads which is a major advantage I guess.

One nice feature is that CBS has added many original Star Trek episodes to the player. If you are a Trekkie you are probably going to love that player. Streams started right away with no delay whatsoever. It surely depends on the Internet connection though and users with slower connections might experience those delays in the beginning until the buffering is sufficient to stream the show.

I won’t be using the Adobe Media Player after this day because it is not offering anything that I would really need. I will closely observe the progress though and make the switch once they add content that is more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice media player but it does not offer anything that the other media players do not offer.

Tags: adobe, adobe media player, cbs, joost, media-player, tv shows

Geexbox Linux Distribution to play multimedia

Martin — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:38:39 +0000

I’m currently still using my old Microsoft Xbox as my media center and it’s working fine so far but I do have thoughts about the future. The Xbox will not last forever and the new Xbox 360 cannot be modified to do the same yet. One alternative that I investigated was building a computer for this purpose and I’m almost sure that I would use the Geexbox Linux distribution as the operating system.

The distribution has a size of 8.9 Megabytes and comes with an unbelievable amount of features. It is a self-bootable Linux distribution based on the excellent Mplayer which assures that it can play (almost) any file that you throw at it. It plays MPEG 1/2/4, Real Media, Windows Media, Ogg and Matroska and audio and network streams.

The multimedia files can be loaded and played from various sources such as CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or even Internet. It’s all there, it’s tiny and booting really fast. It should not have problems with most hardware setups. The requirements are 64 Megabytes of RAM, a Pentium class cpu (400+ Mhz recommended) or a Mac G3+ (G4+ recommended), an an ALSA compatible sound card, a VESA 2.0 compliant graphics card and a CD or DVD drive.

You can download a prebuild ISO image, sources or Debian repositories from the developers website. There is also a list of supported hardware available which is great if you run into troubles or want to build a computer that can run the Linux distribution.

Tags: geexbox, Linux, media, media-player, multimedia

Add Hard Drive Songs to Your Myspace Profile

Cheryl — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 04:24:07 +0000

I have a Myspace profile, thanks to a friend who had his own band. There are a bunch of sites that have fancy comments as well as cool layouts you can use to customize your profile. All in all, I’m fairly satisfied with Myspace.

The one thing that bothered me though was that I could never add a song of my choice to my profile. I’d stumble upon a favorite artist or band but they just wouldn’t have the song I was looking for. Luckily, plenty of people feel the same way, which has led to a fix for this ‘problem’.

This is where Profile Pitstop comes in. This site helps you add songs from your hard drive to your Myspace profile. In the first step, you select the basic look for your player. Basic GUIs range from a cassette or walkman to an Ipod-like interface or just a simple playlist.

Once you decide on a player, you can go ahead and customize it to your liking. This is a great option because you can make your player fit in with the rest of your profile layout. At this stage, you can also decide if you want your songs to begin playing the moment someone visits your page. In addition, you can specify if you want your songs to be played in order or randomly.

The third step involves actually putting the songs into your player. Unfortunately, Profile Pitstop itself does not allow you to upload files directly. You need to upload them to a file storage site and then paste the URLs on the Profile Pitstop page. The key here is that your uploaded file should have a link ending in ‘mp3’. The site itself recommends FileDen for uploading but you can use whatever you like.

Alternatively, you can add links from a site like Skreemr. Just do a search for any song and then paste the link into the Profile Pitstop page. The only downside is that you have no control over how long the song stays online.

Once your playlist is ready, the next page asks you to login or if you would like to register. Registration is not compulsory but if you do register, you will be able to edit your playlist, as well as make changes to your player itself. If you don’t want to register, you can simply click on ‘Skip sign-up’.

In the final step, all you have to do is copy the code which appears and then paste it wherever you want, in your Myspace profile. Or, you can type in your Myspace login details, select a particular section and the player will automatically be placed there. In case you skipped the sign-up, I recommend you copy and paste this code in a text file somewhere on your computer.

This method is the ideal way for someone to add a bunch of songs that are created personally. Maybe you want to relieve a drunken karaoke session or you’d prefer to have the music from your kid’s school recital. You could even record some voice clips and put those up!

Tags: media-player, music, myspace

SMPlayer 0.5.51

Martin — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:24:14 +0000

A new version of the – in my opinion – best media player SMPlayer has been released and can be downloaded from the website of the developers at Sourceforge. SMPlayer is a Mplayer frontend that plays most video codecs out of the box which means that you do not have to install codecs to play the majority of video – and audio – formats. It does play for instance Apple Quicktime .mov videos without the need to install Quicktime at all.

SMPlayer is available for Windows and Linux in various languages including English and Spanish for instance. The download has a size of about 11 Megabytes which is not that much if you consider that you do not have to install additional codecs. All the usual features are supported as well including subtitle support, DVD / SVCD / VCD playback, audio track switching, video equalizers, fast forward, slow motion and lots of preferences.

It is for instance possible to use video playback without hardware acceleration to capture screenshots from the movie.

SMPlayer Homepage

Tags: dvd, media-player, mplayer, multimedia, quicktime, smplayer, video-player

Real Player 11 Beta leaked

Martin — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:57:45 +0000

I’m sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.

I personally do not like the Real Player that much and use the freeware Real Alternative to play the content of that player. There might be however some users that actually like the player and would like to tinker around with the beta version. According to Cybernetnews the beta was not supposed to come out until the end of June.

I can’t really say much about the changes that have been implemented. One feature is a video downloader that is capable of downloading videos from sites like Youtube directly and play them in Real Player afterwards. It will also ship with VCD / DVD burning options which are available depending on edition of Real Player that you use (have purchased). The basic free version seems to ship only with VCD burning options.

While it seems to add several new features I have not seen anything that can’t be achieved with other free tools. I can download the videos using several Firefox extensions or the Orbit Download Manager. Burning is of course more comfortable with real burning softwares such as Nero Burning Rom.

Tags: beta, leak, media-player, real networks, real player 11

Fix Avi Frame Drops and Artefacts on the fly

Martin — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:05:11 +0000

I think we all experienced frame drops and artifacts in avi movies which is pretty annoying if it happens during the whole movie. I found a media player called HDngn which is able to interpolate new frames in realtime using Direct Show and Open GL. This is achieved by using frames more than once and algorithm that recalculate everything in realtime.

I would not say it is the perfect media player yet but it surely has some nice interesting features that no other player offers yet. The drawback is that it currently supports only a limited amount of filetypes and not enough possibilities to change the configuration of the player at all. It took a while until I was able to remove the logo of the player from the upper right corner. I had to edit the lua file which was used to init the interface.

Removing everything that had to do with citus and juicy helped and got rid of the logo that overshadowed the movie. It is possible to rotate, zoom and change the aspect ratio of the movie in realtime which is a nice feature.

Playing videos is easy as well. Just drop a movie into the player and click on play. It is working on all versions of Windows including Vista and is free to use.

Tags: artifacts, avi, frame-drop, hdngn, media-player, playback, realtime, slowdown, video

Songbird the ultimate Media Player ?

Martin — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 07:25:18 +0000

Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 “test flight” and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.

The first start will give you the impression that songbird is big, really big and loaded with features. You see a list of menu items on the left side which consist of your song library, podcasts, radio stations and the like. Clicking on a link loads the website of that service and the available songs in the same window. You have the options to play and download the songs, subscribe to the website, add the song to the playlist or the library while at the same time surfing the website that offers those songs.

A great feature is that you use songbird to play the song which means you can use the controls like pause, play, forward in songbird and don’t rely on plugins in your browser anymore.

Songbird makes it really easy to find new music or more music from artists that you know about. You can search various services for new files, for example singinfish, google, yahoo and emusic. What you do is enter a search term, hit enter and the website of that service loads the search results. Once loaded songbird again displays two content areas, first the website with the content and at the bottom all the mp3 files that are currently available on that page.

You can drag and drop files to your library, playlist, download them and play them in songbird. All working flawlessly.

There is no iPod interaction as of now, at least none that I was able to detect in the short time that I’ve been using songbird.

The developers plan to build in some additional features like extensions which work the same way as they are in firefox and thunderbird and the ability to import and burn songs from CD.

Songbird is probably not the best media player when it comes to playing songs, it feels a little bit clumsly and loaded with features but it defiantly is the best when it comes to interaction between web and player. If you are using lots of podcasts, radio stations and the like songbird should be your number one choice.

Tags: media-player, music, songbird, video-player

Bsplayer 2.0 out

Martin — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 13:51:56 +0000

The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released in the new version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.

The player supports most used multimedia formats like avi, mp(e)g, divx, xvid, asf, wmv and many audio formats like mp3 and wav. It supports subtitles, drag and drop, resolution changing, multipled audio streams and is able to capture frames. If you are still using media player you should try and make the switch, it´s faster and better than it.

Tags: bsplayer, media-player, movie player, vlc

VLC Media Player

Martin — Thu, 04 May 2006 07:12:42 +0000

Don´t you hate all the different video and audio formats, all those codes and tools you need to play them all ? The VLC media player is able to play many formats including (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX) as well as DVD, (S)VCD and various streaming types. The player is available for various systems including windows, macintosh and linux. It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video.

Remarkable is the ability to play broken and incomplete video files which means that users of e.g. emule are able to preview a video without downloading the complete file. The website offers a great howto which helps you understand the players functions. Oh, and it is open source, source code is available on the website.

Tags: media-player, video-player, videolan client, vlc, vlc media player

gHacks technology news » media-player

Windows Media Player Import for Winamp

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