Just about a day ahead of the big launch, a video showing off the XPERIA’s media capabilities was leaked. Seems like it will pose a definite threat to the iPhone. It looks a lot like the Zune HD’s UI and no one thnks it is a coincidence. Still, even that is a good thing because the Zune HD is another device that dare threatens Apple’s supremacy. Over all, I am tempted, very.

Do check out the XPERIA X3/Rachael rumor round up while you wait for SE to release the thing already.

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And so…I thought it would be smart to write about the best tools to play certain media types. Understand that these are the best in my opinion. You might hear differently from every other user.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the best audio and video viewing tools available.

Audio

XMMS. Call me a purist but for straight up audio you can not beat XMMS. No you will not be able to manage your iPod with this tool. But for pure music enjoyment, nothing beats it. And if you were a Winamp user you are in luck because it works the same way. There is one hiccup with using XMMS. If you plan on playing MP3 files, like everyone does, you’ll have to uninstall the XMMS installed on your distribution (if one was in fact installed), and make sure you install the player xmms-mp3 instead. Once installed you can enjoy: mp3, acc, ape, flac, icecase/shoutcast, ogg, shn, speex, tta, wav, wavpack, wma. XMMS is also themeable for all you desktop hipters ;-).

Rhythmbox

Of all the music managers, my favorite is Rhythmox. Rhythmbox was inspired by iTunes so, as you can imagine, it integrates well with iPods and other such devices. And although you can not use Rhythmbox with the iTunes store, you can download music from both Magnatune and Jamendo. Rythmbox also supports DAAP sharing which allows you to connect to a centralized server. Rhythmbox uses Gstreamer so it supports a wide range of audio formats.

Banshee

Banshee is another favorite that manages to one-up Rhythmbox by being the first Linux media manager to integrate with the Android-based G1 phone. Banshee offers all of the features of Rhythmbox minus the ability to download music from a “store”. Banshee does, however, include last.fm stream support. The list of audio files Banshee supports is smaller than that of XMMS mp3, acc, ogg, and wav.

Video

Mplayer

Mplayer is not usually the default video player in Linux nor is it the easiest to install or get running. But when you do get it installed and running it works flawlessly. There are some distributions (such as Elive Compiz) that install MPlayer as the default movie player which plays video files and DVDs perfectly.

VLC

VLC is typically the favorite “universal” media player. This little gem really can play it all. And the beauty of VLC is that it’s cross platform, so if you know VLC in Windows or Mac, you will know it in Linux. VLC supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, as well as DVDs, VCDs, and streaming. VLC is not nearly the installation nightmare of most other video players. If your distribution does not default to VLC, you might want to give it a try before you resign yourself to the idea that Linux and video do not make good bedfellows.

XINE

When all else fails, XINE. XINE is one of the more well done, reliable, versatile of the media players. XINE plays CDs, DVDs, VCDs,? and decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3. You can also install support for mov and mp4 media as well as real player files. XINE is that media player I install when my current distro doesn’t play well with VLC or Mplayer.

Final Thoughts

Viewing media files doesn’t have to be difficult, even in the Linux operating system. Although this list isn’t exhaustive, it is the best of the best IMHO. Any of the above players should work well for you.

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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?

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Any media, whether that be music, a video or an image, on Wikimedia Commons can be commercially re-used and generally speaking the only major licensing limitation is that credit may have to be provided to the creator and copyright holder, if any.

Wikimedia Commons has some amazing photography and has many useful illustrations, such as maps and diagrams. The vast majority of images on the site are categorised extremely well, and they can either be browsed through the categories or use the substandard search tool available.

Many public domain recordings are on Wikimedia Commons and there’s a wide range of classical music and opera available for download. All audio/visual media is stored in the form of OGG files, which may have to be converted before use, but will be natively supported in future versions of Firefox. Some visual recordings, such as that of “The Spirit of St. Louis”, are also available.

Most media on Wikimedia Commons are either public domain, Creative Commons, under the GFDL or licensed under another free licence, which makes it suitable for re-use.

© Goran Andjelic under the GFDL.

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I never quite understood why most people shy away from going to a library. After all, 9 times out of 10, the information you are looking for is available at your local library. In fact, libraries have an excellent collection, not only of books but also CDs, DVDs, scientific journals, etc.

One common reason people shy away from libraries is that they cannot find what they are looking for. The solution to this problem is to use Worldcat. It is a publicly accessible online interface that lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and around the world.

Worldcat lets you search for books, CDs, DVDs, audio books, journals, and just about anything that a library stocks. The best part is that you can search all the libraries in your area at one go. Just type in your search query and your pin code and voila! a list of all the libraries in your neighborhood with the item you searched for.

Depending on your library’s access rules, you may even be able to check out a book directly. If you want to further involve yourself, you can register for a free account. It allows you to build lists, write reviews, and even purchase items from Amazon. Proceeds from the sale go towards supporting your local library.

Worldcat currently searches libraries in 112 countries. I don’t know how many people here visit libraries but I would give Worldcat a try. After all, you never know when you might need it.

Have you ever used Worldcat? What do you think of the service? Do you know of any other similar websites? Let me know in the comments.

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So far in this series of posts I’ve taken a look at Windows Media Player, iTunes, Media Monkey and Helium Music Manager. Today I’m going to review Microsoft’s 3rd Media software offering; the Zune 2.5 Software:

Zune 2.5 Software

I realise the Zune software may not really be considered a serious music management alternative unless you actually have a Zune Mp3 Player, however like iTunes I think you’ll find there’s a lot of reasons to use this program.

The original Zune software was horribly bad, so the decision to start over from scratch was a good one. Unfortunately this meant the initial Zune 2 release lacked some of the functionality of Zune 1, but made up for it by actually being stable and reliable.

Comparisons to iTunes is inevitable, this is after all Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s product. Seemingly the design process for the software was, ‘lets look at iTunes, and do something completely different’, which is actually a good thing.

The result is a very usable and attractive application, in fact although its not designed for advanced users at all, I still enjoy using it just for the well designed UI and attractive theme. Actually what I like best is the playback visualisation. Rather then the usual clouds and swirls, the Zune software displays a full screen of tiled album art, which looks really good:

Tag management and album art retrieval is basic at best, but functional at least. The usual features are included such as smart-playlist creation, sorting by genres and a rating system. The rating system is unusual, simplified to just 3 ratings: ‘nothing’, ‘broken heart’ and ‘heart’. I actually like this because I really hate debating over wether or not a song deserves a 4.5 stars or just plain 4, however I know a lot of people won’t be happy with it.

Really I think Zune’s strength is in it’s interface. In fact I often do use it to browse my library and play songs, just because it does it so nicely. For anything more then that I would suggest the previously reviewed music managers such as Media Monkey.

Conclusion: Great design and UI but lacking in advanced features. Use in conjunction with another music manager or tagger.

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I started off with Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes. However in my review of iTunes I admitted I personally didn’t use it for myself. I decided after posting that, that it would be a good idea to test it out properly for myself, so I downloaded iTunes 7.7.

After playing around with it I came the conclusion that while it’s good if you have an iPod Nano and not a lot of music, its pretty dodgy for any large music libraries and the tagging is hit and miss. Performance on Windows is also pretty shocking, even worse then WMP but I did like the simple and clear interface.

One of the best things about iTunes is that there are a large number of extensions, plugins and addons which can provide some great extra functionality. Aside from that I certainly wasn’t converted.

Media Monkey

Today I decided to cover MediaMonkey, the popular music tagging solution and management software. It’s available in a free and ‘gold version. The free version has plenty of functionality, although the upgrade is good as well.

Media Monkey is the best music file tagger, hands down. If I’m wrong about that, then let me know because I’d love to see what your alternative is. Although I use Media Monkey for all my music tagging, it’s not my favourite player for general music browsing and playing.

It has a lot of great features, but I find the interface extremely unintuitive and takes too much mucking around to get it working to my satisfaction, including finding new themes. Performance however is fantastic, the best out of all the media players I’ve used. It handled my 10 000 track library with ease.

It also has the biggest feature list, overwhelmingly so in fact. The more you use Media Monkey the more about it you’ll discover, in fact I would say it has quite a learning curve compared to other software, although you’ll appreciate it as you find more and more features.

Extensions are available through Scripts. This provides the ability to add some great functions to Media Monkey, but it’s also not the easiest for new users. There is no one directory of scripts, instead you’ll have to Google or scour the official forums. It would be nice to see a Firefox addons style directory added to Media Monkey’s webpage.

For me personally, the interface is what lets it down. I’d love to see the next release focus on this above all else. When compared to WinAmp, iTunes, WMP and even Songbird Media Monkey really feels quite ‘clunky’ and unintuitive, great though the software is.

To conclude, if you need one piece of software to completely organise your music, Media Monkey is the application to do it.

What are your opinions?

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I’m sure we all have our favourites, so I would love to hear exactly what it is that has made you choose what you have. You may use more then one, I know I do. I also understand there is a great number of media players, so I’ve restricted this to just ‘music jukeboxes’, or music management software. I plan to work my way through all the major contenders, starting with Part 1 (WMP and iTunes) today.

I have narrowed down the list so the software must include several criteria:

• Reasonable level of popularity
• Includes all basic music jukebox features such as:
  • ripping and burning of music
  • music library
  • music tagging
  • Music categorisation
• Has had at least one non-beta, stable release
• Under active development

For these reasons some players have been excluded, such as Songbird, which is still working towards release 1.0, foobar2000 and VLC popular though they are.

Apologies also for a primarily Windows focused list, I am after all a Windows user (but also dual-booting Ubuntu on occasion) so it’s what I know.

Windows Media Player

The classic. Not too popular these days with music fans, although personally I don’t think it’s too bad. Much of its popularity is due to bundling with Windows, that’s granted. However it’s still one of the better music management applications.

It has a attractive, easy to use interface suited for beginner users. Once you find your music collection growing the library filtering options will begin to become more limiting. I still find it a fairly attractive way for my music library to be displayed, although only if you have properly tagged music complete with album art.

Tagging is decent, you can search for media if it’s inaccurate. Performance is solid, but not stellar, especially once your music collection grows beyond the 8000+ songs mark. In fact I would say once your collection grows beyond 5000 tracks it becomes just to slow to browse in more then the list view, album art drags it down.

Perhaps the best all-round Media software, it includes photo, video, recorded TV and other media management. Unfortunately some of this functionality is totally superfluous, especially with Vista and Photo Gallery.

Unfortunately it is also buggier then it should be, with some persistent bugs, especially when tagging, becoming a real annoyance. The biggest single problem with Windows Media Player is that it no longer seems to have a real purpose.

It’s a great media manager sure, but who is it for? It’s not lightweight, those people will use VLC or something. iPod owners will use iTunes, Zune owners will use the Zune software. For organising recorded TV, Media Center does the job much better and would use it instead of Windows Live Photo Gallery for image management?

I guess we’ll see what happens with WMP in Windows 7.

iTunes

I must admit, I have very little experience using iTunes. I did try it out a little while ago, but I honestly got so annoyed at the Apple update software I uninstalled the whole thing (the Safari “update” did it for me)

iTunes is very popular, largely because of the connection with the iPod and iTunes Music store, and also because it genuinely is a well-designed, intuitive and useful application. In fact it possibly is the most popular music management and media software, in so small part due to the tight integration with the iTunes online store.

Significant features include the gapless playback, efficient, intuitive and minimal interface, Coverflow, automatic tagging, podcasting and auto-playlists.

One of the biggest iTunes complaints has been the auto-tagging, primarily dodgy support for music not part of the iTunes online store, somewhat unreliable album art downloading and Performance and stability have also reportedly suffered with recent releases, but I can’t give an opinion on that, what have you noticed?

Now I’d love to hear your opinions on both these, wether you use them or not. Tomorrow I plan to cover the major competitors to these two… MediaMonkey and WinAmp.

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One of the best, or at least one with lots of options to choose from, is Media Converter. The music and video converter supports a wide range of file types like flv, avi, mp3 or pdf that can be uploaded and converted online. That’s only part of their service though. Instead of uploading files to Media Converter to convert them online it is possible to point the service to a supported website and convert the media files found on that site directly.

This has the advantage that the source file does not have to be downloaded or uploaded. Only the final product has to be downloaded to the local computer. The media can be converted in the process. Pointing Media Converter to a Youtube video makes it possible to convert the video to mp3, ogg or one of the supported video formats before downloading the converted product.

Another interesting feature of Media Converter is the ability to convert video or music from protocols like rstp, mms or http. All those services are free of charge. Premium users get access to a handful of additional video portals, a larger file size limit, unlimited conversions per day, a higher priority and quality of recording.

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Flock is one very good example and I’ve written about it on gHacks before. Songbird is another, and I have only just begun using this one myself.

I love the concept behind Songbird, and I like the software itself, unfortunately I think the biggest thing letting it down at this point in time is somewhat slow development. It’s not a criticism, but it does make it harder for Songbird to begin gaining a significant market share.

Version 0.6.1 offers some welcome improvements including support for 10 000 song libraries, performance enhancements, better media library searching,

I’ve been playing around with it for a couple days now, and while I’m not fully converted at this point, I’m seeing a product which looks extremely promising once it matures. If it can gain the kind of community which Firefox has then it has a very real chance of rapidly gaining rapid popularity. It’s greatest strength is that it can be extended like Firefox, although at this point it doesn’t quite have the sheer volume of add-ons, but as I said, creating a community will change this.

Considering the move towards cloud computing, online music streaming and always being connected Songbird is making innovative progress towards the kind of media player for the future. Windows Media Player is woefully inadequate for this kind of use, iTunes is too locked in.

It would be very much in stores like Amazons’ interest for this to happen as Songbird, unlike iTunes, offers song purchase choices to multiple online sites. Couple that with a iTunes-like interface and iPod support and we can say goodbye to DRM songs from Apple!

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One of the lesser known features of WMC is that quite a large number of third party plugins are available, and I’ve made up a list of a few good ones. I intent to start using Media Center a lot more in future to manage my media.

Lifextender

Can remove all the annoying advertisements from TV shows you have recorded with Media Center. Considering the average half hour show will be reduced to 22 minutes Lifextender will save you a significant amount of hard drive space. Works only with Vista Media Center.

3) My Movies 2

The best free movie indexing service available for WMC. Once you add media to the library My Movies indexes it and automatically downloads data such as DVD covers, actor and director details and genres. Also has a separate Management program for fixing details.

3) Yougle

An extension so you can watch YouTube videos from your TV. Discontinued for XP Media Center but a Vista version is available.

4) MCE Outlook

Gives handy access to full Outlook functionality including browsing and replying to mail, using the calendar, taking notes and creating contacts. Not sure if it works for Vista MCE.

5) Web Guide 4

Compatible with all Media Centers’ and provides powerful remote viewing and control of your Media Center PC. This means you can watch TV from your mobile device and control recording functions of your WMC.

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Amarok is just like any quality Linux app really, it integrates well into the desktop, it has a simple, clean and easy to use interface and can do almost anything you want, all this for free of course. The main feature that sets it apart from its rivals is the native support of lyrics and Wikipedia search. When you play a song you can click a tab in the sidebar to view the Lyrics, and the next tab to view the Wiki entry of the Band. I actually found myself using the feature a lot since I play the guitar and sing, and it’s easier to just load a song I like and get the lyrics instantly.

Radios are also supported of course, and there’s built in support for Last.fm too, you can easily skip tracks from the panel icon, simple and effective. I also like the way you can set Amarok to display the song being played in different ways. The default stays in the center of the screen for a bit too long for my taste, but you can set it to display in the lower portion, for less time. You can even set fonts and so on, very flexible.

While looks are a bit on the simple side I like them, but of course skins are available on KDE-Look, or you can make your own if you want to. Overall I love this music player and it’s a great addition to my Linux desktop. I’m loving my Ubuntu more and more every day, it’s awesome that free software is better than paid ones.

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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.

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The answer is the Firefox extension DownloadHelper. This was one of the first extensions I added when I installed Firefox. DownloadHelper monitors all the websites you visit and automatically detects any image, music, and video files on that page. If any of these files are there, the icon placed in your toolbar starts hovering. Clicking on the arrow next to it gives a small drop-down menu which displays the names of the files. If you click on any of them, the file automatically starts downloading to your computer.

What I like most about this extension is that it’s easy to use and extremely effective. Plus, if you hit ‘Ctrl + click’, you can add the link to your preferred download manager and download it from there. Another plus is that if you have plenty of tabs open, it will display all the links only from the current tab you are viewing. All in all, this extension is extremely handy to have around for those clips you just cannot save to your hard drive.

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This is however not the case. All videos will no longer play after the termination of the service which can be used as a major argument against DRM services. Google – wisely – decided to compensate users by refunding each and everyone

The money will be refunded into a Google Checkout account and expires after 60 days. What this means is that the users who bought videos from Google Video have 60 days to purchase items that they probably do not need from merchants who use Google Checkout. Hardly a fair deal for the consumer if you ask me.

The steps that Google is undertaking to close down their Video service is clearly showing why DRM is not consumer friendly. If the company that sold you items with DRM goes broke, out of business or decides to terminate the service you will realize that your purchased items do not play anymore – and yes, this is also the case with Apple and the songs that they sell that contain DRM.

If you are lucky you get a full refund, if not you might get something that looks like a refund but is basically pushing a different service which is in this case Google Checkout. And if you are out of luck you might not get compensated at all. Does not feel nice to pay a lot of money for items only to find out that you can’t play them anymore on your system, doesn’t it ?

No one would purchase an item in real life that could stop working if the company selling you the item got broke or quit producing the item but this is exactly what is happening right now.

Google sold you videos, made a strategic decision to terminate their service and decided to push the Google Checkout service by tying the refunds to it.

I think it is helpful that consumers now see and hopefully realize that drm media purchased from “big” companies are not guaranteed to work a lifetime which should hopefully push the masses away from DRM.

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Data Crow was written in Java which means that you need a Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer to be able to install and run the software. When you have done that you can start adding your collection to the program by either adding items manually or importing items from online databases such as Amazon, Imdb, Freedb and Musicbrainz.

If the item is found covers, tracks, and other information are imported directly to the database. One nice feature is that you can search for an artist for instance and import all of the CDs found at once.

Data Crow has another feature that sticks out from other media catalogers which is called Loan Administration. You can add contact information to Data Crow and lend those contacts items from your collection. Everything is registered in the Loan Administration which means that you can always look up if you lend the item to someone.

It is possible to create pdf or html reports and export information to xml or csv files.

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I’m normally not a friend of codec packs because they tend to install many codecs that are not needed on most systems and could pose compatibility problems with codecs already installed on the system. Windows Vista on the other hand misses some essential codecs that can be quite easily added with the Vista Codec Package which can be customized during installation. That is right, unlike other codec packages you can select to install all or only some of the codecs offered.

Most possible conflicts have already been dealt with and the settings have already been altered for best results. The Windows Vista codec package does not ship with a media player which means that no file associations are being made. Just fire up your favorite media player, I recommend VLC or Mplayer, who automatically will use the codecs that are installed on your system.

Windows Vista Codec

All the important codecs are in the package, including xvid, windows media video 9, ffdshow, ogg and ac-3  acm. The codec package can be installed in Windows Vista and Windows XP and runs on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the operating systems.

Installing a Windows Vista Codec Package can have direct impacts on system performance, stability and multimedia output. It is therefor recommended to be very cautious when installing a Windows Vista Codec Package.

Windows Vista Codec Alternatives

A viable alternative is to install a media player that comes with so called binary codecs which can only be used in this program and cannot be accessed by other applications. This has the immense advantage that those codecs cannot “pollute” the system and cause stability and performance issues which windows vista codec packs can.

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The next step would be to create an account at mycast.orb.com. When that is done you can start configuring the service at the server. Right-click the icon that should appear in the system tray and select Configuration. Select the media tab and add folders of videos, music, photos and documents that you want to access with another internet device. You may add other users who are allowed to view your media files.

Once everything is setup you simply open the mycast.orb.com website and login. After that you can browse the contents that the server streams and view it on the other device. A real simple but effective system. I was able to view movies using my Wii that way. You can also stream tv if you have a video card that supports it. I don’t think it makes that much sense to stream tv to my wii but it would be nice if you are using a notebook for instance.

Take a look at the following youtube video which demonstrates orb used by a Nintendo Wii.

Please note that you need a broadband connection to do this kind of things. Some folders are automatically added (my documents). If you do not want this make sure to remove them from the configurations menu.

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Unplug steps in providing the technology to discover media links for mms and real media videos as well. It is also working for flv files that youtube and google video use but not that comfortable as the video downloader add-on. Once the extension is installed you can use the add-on by selecting Tools / UnPlug to scan the website automatically for media links.

A better option would be to add the unplug icon to one of your toolbars for faster access. To do that right-click a toolbar and select customize from the menu. Scroll down until you see the unplug fish and drag it to the toolbar of your choice.

Most of the time you receive a choice of possibilities that could contain the actual movie. It looks more complicated. Unplug tries to help the user by suggesting one or two of the links that it thinks are the most possible correct links to the movie.  I would use this plugin for the sites that the video downloader is not able to process.

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A drawback is that you install many codecs that you do not need and that could interfere with codecs already installed on your system. A more elegant approach would be to scan the media file to find out which codes have been used to encode the file. One freeware that is able to do this is Media Info.

Media Info loads the media file and scans it for codes that are needed to playback the file. It displays extensive information about audio and video streams, the bitrate used to encode the movie and the names of the codec(s). A great feature is a link to the website of the codec used where it is possible to download it and a link to a video player website that is able to play the file without downloading the codec seperately.

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