Waaay OT: Video Playback on a PC

itunes is a bit jack of all trades master of none if you ask me! i'm lazy and use media player although i do like that VLC someone suggested good that is!

My point is, that with Quicktime player it's much closer to comparing like with like - it's not a multi-functional program like iTunes, it's a simple media player, and on exactly the same PC, Ace Media Player plays Quicktime videos smoothly and effortlessly, whereas Quicktime just struggles monumentally. Therefore it's s**te, and grossly inefficiently programmed. The only issue I have is that some QT videos (video podcasts, or vodcasts if you will) don't work properly with the current codec I've got, and I haven't been bothered to find a working one. Sure, if I got a new PC that was much more up to spec then I'd be able to play them on sh'iTunes, but as my PC manages absolutely everything else I use it for just fine, then I'll do without.

You're under the impression that QT is a simple media player. It isn't it's *lots* more than that. To compare it with a stripped-out dedicated player is silly.

But that's just the problem - with Apple's software you don't have a choice. Most people only want a simple media player to play media on. They don't need to be forced to have all the other s**te hogging their resources at the same time. If you were to believe Apple, the only way to play Quicktime videos is to either use Quicktime player or iTunes, and for these to run anything remotely resembling smoothly on a PC, you need something quite modernly specced-up. Whereas other media players can cope just fine on a much lesser PC, when being asked to play exactly the same video files.

RealPlayer plays Quicktime files - Realplayer is crap, but not as crap as quicktime.

But that's because you're playing a generic media file, not a Quick-time specific file.

If you want to play something QT specific, then you use QT player. If you want to play something that isn't QT specific, use something else.

Most 'QT' files are generic MPEG files.

HTH.

LOL i dunno bout you guys but your pc's must be s**te! my pc runs quicktime fine! i hardly use it though but if i do get a quicktime file it loads and plays. quicktime is better for video streaming i find too and the quallity is sometimes sharper than wmv. itunes is still a pile of bollocks mind :)

Well that obviously doesn't include the .m4v files that Windows Media Player won't play, and the codecs I had that worked on Ace Media Player (that took a fair bit of hunting down for) only managed to play about half of properly. Hence my comments that for the average user, it does appear that Quicktime and iTunes are the only bits of software that can easily play them. I've just downloaded VLC though, and that plays them a treat, though it does go weird if you try to resize the window, but leave it alone, or play it in full screen mode, and it's fine and dandy.

Oh yea QT works fine on mine as well, I just don't like it :-)

What, like the Quicktime HD trailers, downloaded from the Apple site which play perfectly with Media Player Classic, those sort of 'generic media files'?

There's very little around that is QT specific. I can't actually think of any time I've downloaded anything that's a QT file that can't be played with other players. However, it's possible that, if you have installed QT, another media player is using the QT codecs to play it. Haven't tested this out by getting rid of QT completely, though.

It's a much more satisfactory situation than exists for wmv files, which are pretty much limited to playback using the MS software.

Or VideoLan Client, Winamp, MediaPlayer Classic, BsPlayer, and others. Just like QT/Mov WMV on a system with WMV codecs uses them in a different front end.

Lighter front ends do such a good job.

To be fair, iTunes for win is a bit of a cludge - it's really not very well ported, and doesn't work anywhere near as nicely as on the Mac. It IS a massive resource hog, well beyond reason - you can run several combinations of individual programs which give you the same, and indeed rather more, functionality simultaneously in well under half the memory footprint, which, given that they don't have common libraries, is pretty crap on behalf of iTunes.

Of course, apple don't really care - it mostly works, it lets them get into the huge PC market and most modern PCs are so overstuffed with memory and CPU that it doesn't matter, and there aren't enough using older PCs to bother them.

Bar the iTunes store, and video-podcasts, it does everything that iTunes does, and with the massive array of plugins, a hell of a lot that iTunes can't. It also starts up in less than a tenth of the time, gives instant searching of HUGE libraries, even of relatively crappy machines, uses around 30% of the system resources that iTunes does, doesn't leave extra processes lying around in memory when it's not doing anything, and supports any file format you fancy.

Couldn't have put it better myself. New PCs are cheap enough these days that the vast majority have something that'll happily run iTunes perfectly well. Heck, my old system (P3-450/320MB RAM) copes fine with it, apart from the video being painfully jerkily slow, making my system come close to crashing.

In its defence though, it does make dealing with podcasts/RSS feeds *very* simple for a numpty like me that's not familiar with things like RSS readers - if I want to subscribe to a podcast in most cases I can just click on a link that'll go straight to iTunes and it'll sort things out for me, in user-friendly interface format. Even when a mate of mine did a podcast and just put an RSS link up on his site, it was a dead simple case of spending about 2 seconds pasting that link into the right bit of iTunes, and hey presto, up on the list amongst all the others.

But I don't bother using it for general music playing - I just find it far easier to use Winamp, which loads in a fraction of the time. Even if I did have a much better specced PC, I'd probably use the resources for far more productive things than having an over-bloated media player sitting there most of the time doing not a lot.