Apple Archive

Media Players for OS 9 and X: The Good, the Slow, and the Ugly

- 2004.04.09

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.

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