[NTLUG:Discuss] Media Players

[Kyle Davenport]

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Hi Leroy,

      I noticed that starting more than 5 years ago, the Linux media
players could play _more_ types of media than the Window's players, but it
is still a constant struggle as They introduce new proprietary codecs.  In
general the mplayer crowd has done an amazing job of hacking support for
these new codecs/streams/protocols into mplayer before the big commercial
players.  So in my experience, the broadest support is available with
mplayer, then xine, then vlc, then helix.

      I did have an experience recently tho, that raises other problems.  I
downloaded the media file, it was an asx or wmf file which was just a
playlist with urls.  When I tried to access these urls with mplayer
(normally no problem) it would just get another playlist file (ad
infinitum).  The same url worked from MS media player (running in wine), so
I assume there was some handshaking going on with the server.  Not sure
what to do about these.  I'm sure if I could have downloaded the media
file, mplayer would have played it.

Kyle