Windows Users: You can ignore this, you have bigger problems.
Mac Users: Microsoft has shown what an asshat it is yet again by finally giving up on even the premise of offering a decent video player for MacOSX. This would have happened a lot sooner, of course, had it not been for their stupid proprietary WMV video format that doesn’t work on anything but the Microsoft Media Player and which people, for some reason, continue to use. This halt in development is of course good news, as the Mac version of the Windows Media Player was almost as buggy as it was abhorently slow and unweildy, lacking anything even resembling a feature, let alone any effort at performance or efficiency.
The fun part is that, like with their Mac version of Internet Explorer (which they gave up on in the same way as soon as Apple released their Safari browser which was 10x better than IE), all it took for Microsoft to throw in the towel was for someone way smaller with less resources to rub a few brain cells together and make something better. In this case its the Flip4Mac plugin that just lets you play the WMV files in QuickTime, where they run smoothly and flawlessly like they should have in the Microsoft program. I 100% recommend this download as indispensible for Mac users who watch videos online, as well as for it’s metaphorical value in reinforcing why Microsoft shouldn’t be trusted to do things properly ever.
Linux Users: Keep up the good work, if Apple keeps jerking it’s customers around and upping the DRM I’ll be among you by the time I buy a new computer.
(Article about it. Thanks to OneGoodMove.org for the tip.)
Flip4Mac does not play well with DRM WMV.
Example:
Video on http://www.WWE.com
VLC player is pretty good (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/).
It works in fullscreen without having to pay for a Quick Time Pro account and plays pretty much all files – other than DRM WMV as well, I think.
well 1. I’m pretty sure WMV drm didn’t play well with the Microsoft player as nothing really did. 2. I <3 VLC and use it whenever I watch videos off my hard drive but have found it’s support for wmv files spotty and a bit buggy (they have a tendency to show all glitchy and scrambled like porn on the pay channels when you just have basic cable).
Also that wrestling thing offers a flash version of the show i navigated to (maybe there’s others where it doesn’t…), which is of course the way everything is heading, especially since Adobe/Macromedia made the swf specs open-source or whatever it was they did. Eventually all you’ll have to do to watch any movie is download the 10-second flash-plugin which will already be part of your browser anyway. YES! (see Google Video for an example of this)
Flip4Mac is a great plug in for me. Some good info bits can be found here: http://flip4mac.blogspot.com/
Quite cheap to upgrade features, too.
Ha ha. Oh man. Normally I’d delete that kind of shameless promo (I mean really, if you’re going to use a blogspot account to try and make yourself look neutral don’t sign posts with an @telestream.com adress ((telestream is the company that developed flip4mac, which has a paid upgrade from the free version))) but it really is good software and your little blog plug is cute.