I have at least three different media players installed on my
Mac. QuickTime, which comes with the OS, Real Player, and Windows
Media Player. I know I had a few others installed to play some even
more obscure formats at one point. These days I have to put up with
so many different formats on different sites, and not all of them
even work properly.
QuickTime works very well, but that's expected. I mean, it is an
Apple product running on the Mac OS - it should work well. The
interface (while I've never been a fan of the brushed metal
appearance) is fast, videos play at an acceptable speed, and you've
got all the standard controls: play, pause, cue, and review. You
can also scan through the movie yourself, which I often like to do
if I'm trying to search for a specific section.
You've also got formats such as RealVideo and RealAudio. Their
OS 9 player is very slow, especially when quitting it (it sits
there for a good ten seconds before it actually closes). Video and
audio quality isn't too bad, though, provided the file doesn't have
too high a compression rate, or, if you're using a streaming file
off the Internet, make sure you choose a higher bitrate if you
can.
Windows Media Player is where I have the issue. Windows Media
for the Mac has always been relatively poorly implemented. The
first version was buggy, extremely slow, and in fact barely worked
at all! The second version - the last one for OS 9, which is
labeled version 7.1 - sort of works.
Why do I say "sort of"? It will play a video, but forget trying
to scan through the video using the slider. First of all, it won't
let you. Second, when you try to forward the video, it doesn't
always resume from the place you forwarded it to! Then, of course,
the whole interface is just generally slow and somewhat buggy.
How about for OS X? The newer RealOne player for OS X is
significantly better than the older OS 9 version. The
interface is quick, once you make a few changes to some default
settings - and its not all that ugly, either. The videos play fine,
although QuickTime is still a bit better in terms of quality, at
least from my perspective.
Windows Media Player for X is a bit better than their OS 9
version, too. The interface isn't as slow (and it looks much
nicer), but the bug with being unable to scan through video is
still there. It's also interesting to note that you can't do this
in the Windows version either, which I would expect that Microsoft
spends a bit more time developing.
I'm glad that both Real and Microsoft are putting some energy
into developing their players for Mac OS X. While life would
be much easier if there were only one standard media format on the
Internet (for example, as I mentioned in a
previous article, life has become easier for many people now
that the Microsoft
Word .doc file is standard).
This, of course, would ruin competition, and we'd be stuck with
one format controlled by a company with no incentive to improve the
format's quality.
Right now, the best we can hope for is an improvement in quality
in each consecutive version of Windows Media Player and RealOne
player. We've already seen improvements between the OS 9 and
OS X versions, and we can only hope for more. After all, they
are competing against each other, and in order for people to want
to use the player, they all have to make their own format high
quality and work well.
