Alternative Media Players
Some of the best Media Players and how they work with codecs
Media player is the software on your computer that decompresses a given video or audio file using a codec and plays it back on the computer screen. The media player can be used as a stand alone application or embedded in a Web page to create a video application interacting with HTML content. With the development of software and the Internet in general, nowadays there are a lot of companies involved in the process of creating different media players. And as you know, a market with a lot of competitors involved, is destined to bring out some good products. This article, in particular, focuses on some of the more capable and better developed players that you should try (if you haven’t done that so far). Some are freeware, others require you to pay a certain amount of money. The products that will be reviewed here in terms of their options and range of codecs included are: BSPlayer, VLC, GOM, Windows Media Player 11, AlShow, DivX Player 6.4. All of these applications are capable of playing both audio and video files.
As you probably remember, the word “codec” was contained in the definition of a media player. Indeed, codec is a very important piece of software. The word comes from the combination 'Compression/Decompression’. A codec is software that is used to compress or decompress a digital media file, such as a song or video. Historically, video was stored as an analog signal on magnetic tape. Around the time when the compact disc entered the market as a digital-format replacement for analog audio, it became feasible to also begin storing and using video in digital form, and a variety of such technologies began to emerge. That is how mathematicians and computer programmers came up with the ‘codec’ concept. A codec is a complex encoding and decoding algorithm used to create and then read a given audio or video file. Currently, there is a huge number of different types of codecs available. The different media players contain different codecs. Of course, you can download and install some of the codecs packages available on the Internet, but instead of spending more money, you can use the media players described here (because they come with built-in codecs). A common problem is when an end user wants to watch a video stream encoded with a specific codec that is not present and properly installed on the his machine. In such case, the video won't play (or won't play optimally). That is something that has happened to all of use, at one point or another. Therefore, to prevent it, you must use the best media player around, with the most through list of codecs included.
Alternative Player Guide Continued
