Posted on Thursday 10 November 2005 - Popularity: 7%
Windows Media Videos (WMV) is something that gets us Mac users angry pretty often. Microsofts Windows Media Player and the browser plugin are, sorry I have to say it, a pain in the ass! Pausing and than resuming playback often results in audio and video being out of sync or it just doesn’t play anything at all before you restart the whole movie, it’s slow, streaming hiccups can often result in the same problems as if you pause and resume a movie … yeah, it really isn’t a great format on the Mac. If just QuickTime could play those files, everything would be fine, but it can’t … till now!
Flip4Mac is a QuickTime component to play Windows Media Video (WMV) format versions 7, 8, 9, SD, and HD, as well as Windows Media Audio (WMA) format versions 7, 8, 9, Professional, and Lossless. The QT component is not free, but if you can remove something as evil as the Windows Media Player from your Mac, I’m sure you’ll agree, $9.99 isn’t that much money.
Macworld has a nice review of the component on their site, they end it with the following words:
It would be nice if Web sites all decided tomorrow to switch to QuickTime formats for their media. But since that’s not going to happen, Mac users may as well be able to enjoy Windows Media files, and WMV Player certainly brings us a few steps closer to that goal. Sure, Windows Media Player is free whereas WMV Player is $10, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for, and this is one of those times.
Honestly, I can’t agree more.
Fredi
November 11th, 2005 at 12:55 am
[…] And I don’t know if you’re like me but, man, am I ever pissed off at sites that offer Windoze-only videos, the damn WMV files. VLC and MPlayer will play some of them but a large part simply are incompatible. Well, I wouldn’t know if this is true or not but Fredi Bach of OS X Code (r,s) reports that Now you can play WMV files with QuickTime!: Windows Media Videos (WMV) is something that gets us Mac users angry pretty often. Microsofts Windows Media Player and the browser plugin are, sorry I have to say it, a pain in the ass! Pausing and than resuming playback often results in audio and video being out of sync or it just doesn’t play anything at all before you restart the whole movie, it’s slow, streaming hiccups can often result in the same problems as if you pause and resume a movie … yeah, it really isn’t a great format on the Mac. If just QuickTime could play those files, everything would be fine, but it can’t … till now! […]
January 10th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Deja vous! I’ve been trying to find a way to deal with WMV files for the past half hour. Ah, the sudden rush of familiarity. I went through this exact process about 2 years ago. And reached the same conclusions. You can’t play a WMV file adequately - you have to pay to get an application to rip it - and at the top of the list: it’s really not worth the trouble to even try watching WMV files. If it can’t be delivered in an industry standard format, then the content is probably of the same poor quality. I guess I’ll go back to ignoring WMV files. Hassles playing video files properly belongs to the floppy disc era. Life is too short and computing is now too hassle-free for that to be acceptable. Who needs DRM when we’ve got WMV? Or, if it’s already broken, why break it - further?
February 24th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
.wmv player
June 27th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
[…] OS X Code (r,s) - A Mac blog about coders and the code they write Windows Media Videos (WMV) is something that gets us Mac users angry pretty often. Microsofts Windows Media Player and the browser plugin are, sorry I have to say it, a pain in the ass! […]
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