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This live call involved a gentleman asking me for a good free alternative to Windows Media Player. He’s had a lot of trouble using WMP, and doesn’t really like it.

The chat room immediately went nuts on this request, yelling (typing, of course) out names of various media players. Everyone has their favorites, it seems. My first suggestion is VLC, and the other one is MPlayer. Both of them are free, and work very well. In fact, the new Google Video player is based on VLC.

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

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<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wL27nUjWOb4"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wL27nUjWOb4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

Open Source Media Player Alternatives

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

http://live.pirillo.com/ – A question came in during our Round Table, asking what player can be used on your computer to play any type of media file format. The answer was unanimous… VLC.

Four of my friends joined me for this discussion: Kat, SC_Thor, Wirelesspacket, and last but certainly not least… Datalore.

Video Lan VLC player is a cross-platform media player and streaming server. VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC, as I already mention, is cross platform: you can use it on Windows, OS X, and even Linux! It’s completely open source, and the source code is easy to get to on their website if you care to try and make it work on an unsupported Operating System.

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<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ran8yHRjeQM"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ran8yHRjeQM" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

Formats Available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4) Flash Video (.flv) MP3 Audio (.mp3)

Media Player that can Play all Music and Video Files