Windows Media Player Alternatives

[Nomad]

I know there are alternatives, which ones are people using? Any recommendations and more importantly, any that are deemed to be bad.

[junk2drive]

My wife has a bunch of players because of all the crap that people send her that take a specific player to watch or hear. They all nag you with updates and want to be the default and add toolbars etc and want to connect to the internet to spy on you, lol

Sooner or later you get something that will only work on WMP

[Tomokatu]

I find that IrfanView, with various plug-ins, meets most of my needs, which are not very demanding.

[JamesM]

I have three installed

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

This is probably the best one for video files.

http://www.codecguide.com/download_mega.htm

K-Lite is also very good for video and mp3's

http://www.winamp.com/

This is the one that I use listen to all my music mp3's because it has a decent play list organizer.

Hope this helps.

[Nomad]

Yes, thank you. Looks like winamp is what I am looking for now.

[72M]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_player_classic

It's the best I've found.

[Arctic Blast]

I'll second jamesm's mention of VideoLan (or VLC) player. I've encountered video files that won't play on anything else, but they will there. And since they update the codecs every time they release a new version of the program, you're always up to date.

For audio, I use MediaMonkey. Nice player that very quickly catalogs your entire collection without skipping some as other players have done in my case. Very easy to use. You can set up playlists, you can enter your favorite podcasts in to the podcast subscription tool and it will auto-download them when a new one comes out, you can listen to Internet radio through it, burn CD's, pretty much everything.

[madgamer2]

I can't speak much on the video stuff as I do not view movies and such on it but you are right there are many players out there. My suggestion is to purchase an external sound USB unit like Asus"s Xonar which I use or Soundblaster external 24 live which i used before. I use Nero essentials 9 for Win 7 for video and recording or coping CD's and such.
My advice is to not use Real Player as it can create a large folder without even asking you and gobble up memory.

Madgamer