gHacks technology news » video-player

Miro 2.5 RC1 Released

Martin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:42:17 +0000

The Miro team has released the first release candidate of the upcoming Miro 2.5 version. Miro is a very convenient media player that combines Internet media with local media. It offers one of the most sophisticated and easy to use interfaces. Users can integrate their audio and video files in Miro but the main advantage is the ability to subscribe to channels to download and watch their content in the player. It is pretty much like RSS feeds only that the content is not only text but also video and audio content.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of content channels to choose from the latest movie trailers to the most popular Youtube videos to Ubuntu guides. It is also possible to add feeds that you discover that are not already included in Miro. These feeds will be handled just like any other feed.

It is possible to auto download new posts from the subscribed feeds or to download them manually. Miro offers a built in Torrent client as well which makes it possible to download audio and video torrents to watch them in the interface as well.

Version 2.5 of Miro comes with some serious (that’s what the developers call it) speed and memory usage improvements. It can be downloaded from the nightlies downloads page.

Tags: audio, audio player, miro, miro 2.5, rss audio, rss video, torrents, video, video-player

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

SMPlayer 0.6.7 out

Martin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:29:26 +0000

My favorite and default video player SMPlayer has been updated to version 0.6.7 today. SMPlayer is the complete video player solution for both the Windows and Linux operating system. It is basically a frontend for the much acclaimed MPlayer that is included in the distribution. SMPlayer comes both as a portable video player but also as a installer to suite all the needs.

Since it is based on MPlayer it can play pretty much any video format right out of the box without having to search for missing codecs on the Internet. It can play DVDs, supports various subtitle formats, provides multiple audio track access, playlist support and a lot more.

One of the more recent versions added support to search for subtitles in the Open Subtitles databases. Sure, there are other video players that offer a similar all-inclusive out of the box experience and it probably boils down to which was first installed on the computer system for those users.

Anyone else who is still using a video player that needs external codecs to play video formats should take a look at the latest version of SMPlayer as it makes that a thing of the past.

Most important changes in SMPlayer 0.6.7:

Added experimental (and uncomplete) support for dvd menus. Requires a mplayer build compiled with dvdnav support. Please read dvdmenus.txt to know how to enable it.
Now loading an external subtitle file doesn’t require to restart the mplayer process (except for idx/sub subtitles).
(Playlist) When a file is added to the playlist, if it was already in the list, it’s moved to the end of the list.
Options for mplayer: finally spaces in arguments between quotes are handled properly.
Added two options (in the audio and subtitle menus) to allow the user to enter the audio and subtitle delay (in milliseconds).
(ASS subtitles) The outline and shadow options now accept values with decimals.
(ASS subtitles) Possibility to change the color of the border and shadow.
Now the default value for the “correct pts” option is auto.
(Windows) Now the screensaver is allowed to turn on if the file is paused or it’s an audio file.
(Windows) The direct3d video output is now the default for Windows Vista.

Tags: linux software, mplayer, portable software, smplayer, smplayer 0.6.7, smplayer codecs, video-player, videos, windows software

Windows Media Player Light

Martin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:24:45 +0000

Whenever Microsoft sends out a new version of their upcoming operating system Windows 7 to their partners they can be sure that someone will post information about it soon thereafter. Many screenshots of features of the new Windows 7 client have been posted a day ago which showed some of the new features and design changes that Microsoft made.

One of the more interesting aspects was Windows Media Player Light which was only briefly shown and mentioned in the information. Thankfully some additional information have come to light. A Windows Media Player Light video was posted that is showing Windows Media Player light in action.

One could think that the light version of the Windows Media Player is just the same unresponsive resource eating monster with hidden interface components but that is apparently not the case. Windows Media Player Light seems to open videos as fast as the alternative clients that experienced users use on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Clients like SMPlayer, MPlayer or VLC open videos instantly and it seems to be that Windows Media Player Light can compete on that level.

It would have been interesting if the light version does use less resources than the full version of Windows Media Player. Another question that surely comes up would be the compatibility of Windows Media Player Light. Does it have the same functionality as the normal version or can it be used exclusively to watch multimedia files on the computer without having access to playlists, skins or premium services.

Tags: microsoft, operating system, video-player, videos, windows 7, windows media player, windows media player light

SMPlayer Portable

Martin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:50:03 +0000

Now look at that. Brad Linder over at the Download Squad discovered a portable version of my favorite media player SMPlayer. SMPlayer itself is a frontend for the highly popular MPlayer which can play most media formats right of the box. It’s a multi-plattform player available for Windows and Linux. The portable version of SMPlayer is available for Windows operating systems. One thing that bothered me after downloading the software was that it was packed in 7z format.

I had to install 7-zip to unpack the package, not sure if there are other packers that support the 7z format by now. That is a bit unfortunate and it would have been nice if another format would be available as well.

SMPlayer is ready to play any video file that you throw at it after uninstallation. Just start the player and load the video that you want. The portable and installation version of SMPlayer use virtually the same amount of computer memory when running.

SMPlayer Portable comes with several themes that can be applied. The differences between the portable and installation version are the following:

The ini will be written in the SMPlayer folder
Nothing is written to the Windows Registry
Default Home folders are not created. Screenshot folder for instance would have to be created separately in the root directory and a path would have to be edited in SMplayer
No File associations

The main use would be to put the portable version on a stick and use it on computers that do not allow installations and only come with Media Player installed.

Tags: mplayer, smplayer, software, video software, video-player, videos

Stream Video Torrents

Martin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:18:00 +0000

I’m not really into a streaming solution for videos that are available as torrents because I prefer to download the video to have the option to play it whenever I like and not in the instant it starts playing during the download.

It could be however an interesting option to preview the video before downloading it completely. Maybe it does make sense for users who do not want to download the videos but view them right at the moment only.

RarPlayer combines the media player VLC with a software that can download and process video torrents. It supports the most popular video formats like avi or mov but unfortunately cannot cope with archives that contain videos. This means the video has to be available in its original format and cannot be made available as an archive.

The program achieves this by downloading the first parts of the video at the beginning so that it can start playing after a short while. It obviously depends on the number of seeders on how fast the video can be played. It can happen that it stops somewhere in the middle because it needs to buffer again.

My main point of criticism would be the lack of controls of the player itself. I was not able to rewind which is probably because of the streaming process but it becomes terribly annoying if you watch for about a minute and notice that the player stops playing and starts buffering again. It would be nice to have some kind of buffer to rewind a short time to play the video again from a certain point.

It also seems to crash quite often if you feed it with torrents that point to unsupported file types.

Tags: stream torrents, torrents, video torrents, video-player

SMPlayer Uncommon Codecs Package

Martin — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:51:01 +0000

SMPlayer is my video player of choice. It comes with the most commonly used video and audio codecs installed and it is quite uncommon that one runs into a video that cannot be played out of the box in SMPlayer. A great advantage of SMPlayer in my opinion is the way it stores the codecs. They are actually stored in the SMPlayer directory and not global codecs which means it is highly unlikely that you will run into incompatibilities.

I recently discovered that a so called additional codecs package for SMPlayer, and MPlayer obviously, is available and can be installed to support additional video and audio formats. These codecs will also be installed as so called binary codecs straight into the SMPlayer folder.

The major problem that I ran into was that I was not able to find a list of the codecs that are installed this way. The only possibility that I can think of right now is to search for the filenames in a search engine which will reveal their purpose. The codec package adds 63 new files to the codec directory. I probably would only install it if I would encounter a video that I could not play properly though.

Tags: codecs, mplayer, smplayer, smplayer codecs, video-player

Taking a second look at Miro

Martin — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 12:00:47 +0000

When I first reviewed Miro it was still known as the Democracy Player; a lot has changed since then and I decided to take a second look at Miro. The first question that I was asking myself was how I could classify Miro. Is it a video player, a videocast player, a way to play videos from video portals ? It’s actually all of this although I would not use it for everything that I have just mentioned.

I would classify Miro as a videocast player with extended functionality. If you think Joost or Bablegum now you are wrong because Miro is open plattform while the other two are not. Open Plattform, what’s that again ? Open Plattform means that any video producer can get his videos on Miro and that every viewer can also add videos using urls. Try that with Joost.

Another huge difference is that videos are actually downloaded to your hard drive and placed by default in the My Videos folder if you are using Windows. That means that you can watch them, burn them or send them to a friend without problems. The option to send a email link to a friend also exists in Miro btw.

The quality of the video depends how it was encoded but I can say that it is better than the quality of Joost from what I have seen so far.

The channel system has another advantage. You can subscribe to channels and when you do that you can opt to download new videos automatically when they are published. A few default channels are already added to your sidebar but those naturally don’t appeal to everyone.

If you take a look at the categories offered you notice 3283 categories like Music, Food and Sports at the moment. A click on a category opens a list of available publishers and a click on a publisher the list of available videos from that publishers. Videos can be downloaded with the click of the left mouse button and can be added to playlists which are filled by dragging and dropping downloaded videos into them.

Besides the possibility to add videos from channels or urls users can also search popular video portals like Youtube, Google Video and Dailymotion and add videos found there to their library. Those videos are downloaded as well which means that you can watch them with another video player or send them to your friends easily.

If I had something to criticize it would be the following. You can’t reach the category list from everywhere nor is there a home button. I had to click on Miro Guide to access these features. Another criticism is that you can’t go back since there is no back button. This is for example irritating if you browse a channel and find a publisher that sounds interesting. Once you click on that publisher you can’t get back to the list of channels.

There is no way to navigate search results if you search one of the video portals. You only see a handful of results and can’t browse to a existing second page of results. At least I could not figure out how this would be possible. It would be nice if it would be possible to search multiple video portals at once and see one results list.

Yes, that screenshot is from the game Cannon Fodder on the Commodore Amiga by the Bitmap Brothers.

Tags: bablegum, democracy player, joost, miro, video-player

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

A VLC alternative called SMPlayer

Martin — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:03:54 +0000

One of my regular readers CC send me a link to SMPlayer about a week ago and I was testing the frontend for mplayer since. SMPlayer is a video player that is supporting the most important video formats out of the box including avi, mpg, mov, wmv and vob plus numerous other formats.

It is also possible to play DVDs and Internet streams with the video player that is available for Windows and Linux. Several ways of displaying subtitles and various subtitle formats are supported including srt, sub and DVD subtitles. I personally think that SMPlayer is a great alternative to the VLC player.

This could be useful for everyone who is having troubles with VLC for example. The only real difference that I was able to spot was that the SMPlayer is Open Source and that it remembers where the playback of the video stopped. Make sure you download the full SMPlayer plus the update.

Tags: mplayer, smplayer, video-player, videolan, vlc

Firefox: Open Links and Mailto’s in external applications

Martin — Tue, 22 May 2007 06:03:19 +0000

I prefer to watch videos in my favorite video player VLC instead of watching them embedded on the web. If you click on a video file on a website you open it either in your default video viewer or view it right in your browser using a plugin. You may also open websites in different browsers which is great for developers who were using several add-ons to view a website in different browsers.

Just right-click the link and select the application that you want to use to view it from the menu. Launchy, that is the name of the Firefox add-on, supports more than 60 applications right out of the box with the ability to add more applications using an XML file.

It is possible to disable programs that have been found and are selectable in the right-click menu.

If you for instance want to view the source you have the option to use Ultraedit, Notepad, Open Office or Wordpad which is pure overkill. It is convenient to remove all but one program unless you really use more than one source viewer.

I personally can see two great applications for Launchy. The first is for webmasters who like to test websites in several browsers. The second is for users who would like to open media files in external applications and for users who like to send images right into their image editing software.

Tags: firefox, firefox-extensions, image viewer, launchy, video-player

Test Driving Democracy Player 0.9.5

Martin — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:42:38 +0000

I was contacted by the creators of the famous Democracy Player to test drive the upcoming Democracy Player 0.9.5 which is scheduled for release this Wednesday. The most important features that will be introduced in this new version are pausing and resuming of downloads, submit buttons to digg, del.icio.us and reddit, proxy support and an interface redesign.

Democracy Player is not just a video player with support for most video formats such as divx and quicktime mov but also incorporates the internet with so called channels that use video feeds, rss channels, podcasts and video blogs which are sorted in categories like Comedy, Politics and Technology.

A great feature is the search routine for sites like Youtube and Dailymotion that makes it possible to search and download movies from those sites without leaving the player. Adding RSS channels is as easy. Just choose add channel from the menu and paste the RSS feed url into the box that popups. Democracy Player will do the rest and download the contents of the feed.

I’m not using bittorrent that often but the feature should be interesting for some users who do. Just load a torrent file into the player and it connects automatically to the peers and downloads it to your computer. The proxy feature could be useful if you want to stay anonymous during the process.

I could not find preferences for the torrent feature, the developers promised to add functionality to this process in future versions. I think that it would be better to use a program like utorrent to download movies for now and import them into the player when they are finished. Once preferences become available such as upload and download limits it could become the downloader of choice for movies.

The player can be downloaded for windows, linux and macintosh.

Tags: democracy player, download movies, video-player

Add Features to your MP3 Player

Martin — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:56:51 +0000

If you are currently unhappy with the features of your mp3 player you might want to take a look at the open source rockbox firmware which adds lots of functionality to your mp3 player including iPods, iRiver and Archos models. A firmware update is of course something that should only be done with extreme precaution because it will void the warranty. Take a look at some of the features that can be added:

support for additional sound codecs such as ogg and flac
support for games such as Doom, Sokoban and Sudoku
support for applications like calculators, battery related and text editors
video support (yes even for ipod nanos 1st gen for instance)
Gameboy emulator

Installing Rockbox is not as difficulty as it sounds. Take a look at the manual pages which contains all the information you need for all supported mp3 players. Again, you should be very careful before you proceed. Everything is explained in detail and it should not be that much of a problem to install the new firmware. The rockbox forums are also a great way to have any remaining questions answered before making the changes.

Tags: apple, features, firmware, iPod, mp3, mp3-player, rockbox, update, video-player

Democracy Player

Dearon — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:37:58 +0000

Watching tv through the internet is becoming more popular. Just take a look at the many sites that link to all kinds of tv series that are online on the different video sites. Or what about all the other videos made by all kinds of users on those video sites (youtube, google video, dailymotion) Democracy Player might be the next step on internet television.

Democracy Player has a nice video player, that supports different video formats, like MPEG and AVI for example. Democracy Player supports different ways to get videos.

You can add RSS feeds, podcasts and video blogs which are deliverd in the form of channels. You can also search trough a number of different video sites and download the media like you do of a channel. All the media that you download will go to the new videos/collections tab in which you can view them.

Democracy Player is very simple to use, while still delivering a great service. Some people made claims saying this is the Firefox for videos, i can’t say if Democracy Player will be as popular as Firefox, but it does have allot of potential.

Tags: democracy player, movie, video-player

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

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 » video-player

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