Media Players

[Seil]

The recent threads concerning Metal Gear Solid 4 caught my attention, as I', a huge fan of the series - people have been awesome enough to include video links in their posts, for things such as the villains - Beauty and the Beast - to the game play footage. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the content was available for download.

However, upon downloading said files, my media player, Winamp, wouldn't play them. It just... wouldn't. All it showed for the videos was a black screen. It plays other videos, it's just... choicey. So I guess my question is this:

Is there a media player out there on the world wide web that would allow me to do all the same functions that I do with Winamp, such as watch movies and listen to music that's not Window's Media Player or iTunes?

[Nikose Tyris]

www.videolan.org

VLC media player. It plays EVERYTHING, from Mpegs to Windows Media Format to fuckin' Linux formats.

the one and only format that I have found that it does not play, are Realmedia files- but it plays everything else.

[Demetrius]

Also install the CCCP pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/) to finish it all off.

[synkr0nized]

FYI, Winamp doesn't natively play these videos -- it relies on installed Windows Media Player codecs and the like (at least in the sense that one installs these for use in WMP; I know at least Winamp 1.x-2.x merely hooked WMP to process video content). As such, it'd make sense to use the above-mentioned CCCP to take care of every format you'd need.

[Fifthfiend]

www.videolan.orgthe one and only format that I have found that it does not play, are Realmedia files- but it plays everything else.

And I mean, fuck Realmedia files.

[Sky Warrior Bob]

Just a bit of a qualifier, but all the files that I've seen for Metal Gear Solid 4, are all MP4. Of course, Quicktime will play those just fine, but you've got to register it to do a proper Save As.

SWB

[Eltargrim]

Thirding CCCP, because, in addition to being able to play pretty much anything, you can use the integrated Media Player Classic (Which I find to be preferable to VLC in the softsub area) with RealAlternative to not actually have to have RealPlayer on your computer.