Windows Media player has been giving me fits for the past couple of months. It got to the point where nearly any video I tried to play with it would hang the player. So I tried to uninstall and reinstall it. No such luck. The uninstall seemed to go fine but when I tried to step back to version 9, it refused to install telling me a new version was already found on my system. So I guess it didn’t uninstall afternoon.
What a pain in the butt piece of software. I thought for a minute there I was running Real Player!
But I recently came across a great little cross-platform media player called VLC Media Player. It’s basic looking but it does something that Windows Media doesn’t do: It just plain works!
Exerpt from their site:
VLC 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.
Nordquist Blog 