Media Player of choice?

Looking for a light, even no install, media player. IMO Winamp is getting as bloated as WMP. I tried GOM Player, but it's rather heavy on resource usage. I've downloaded XMPlay and Media Player Classic and am trying them out, but I was wondering what you all used. There may be a good one I haven't heard of. I keep my music in wav and flac files, and convert to MP3 LAME for my portable player. I've got EAC for ripping and Easy CD-DA for burning, so all I really need is a player. Compatibility with Winamp DSP plugins would be a plus, but not necessary.

 

Give VLC a try. Or Portable VLC if no installation is your preference.

 

Thanks ThunderZ, I'll check it out.

 

Glad to have helped. I have used it for quit some time and have been very happy with it as a replacement for WMP. Never was a big fan of Winamp, WMP or some of the other more well known media players. Used Media Player Classic for a while as well. VLC seems a bit more polished and feature rich. Let us know what you think.

 

QCD \ Quintessential Player (proprietary freeware)

w\ this skin (there are 64 pages of them of course that one's features are rather lean)
and samurize which has a native QCD option for the OSD of the current track


the rip to ogg and conversion feature is really useful
and of course I employ other players and tools to crack DRM crapola to ogg
(generally for clients I certainly dont buy any DRM media)
also have the FLAC plugin for lossless

its time everyone start to abandon MP3 anyway
much less .AAC or .WMA

I do video separately with Media Player Classic \ K-lite mega

 

Thanks Ice, I'll look into it. These days I stay away from DRM as well. I had a bunch of older DRM WMA's from the days that I didn't know any better, but I converted them all using MuvAudio. It's nice in that it gives you a digital to digital recording and not digital to analog to digital. Never tried Ogg format because I keep my music primarily in wav, and I don't use my portable player that much, but I'll convert a few files and check it out. Been staying with MP3 just out of habit, could be time to move on. Thanks for the article, a nice read.

 

well ogg got developed when MP3 started in with license fees and patent enforcement
its patent free and opensource, ogg is actually a container format and can be employed with both lossy compression (vorbis for instance) or lossless compression (FLAC)

 

For music I use foobar2000, but for movies I mostly use K-Lite Codec Pack which is like VLC Player but I personally think it's a little more light-weight. For DVDs though I use PowerDVD.

 

For music i use MusikCube and for movies Media Player Classic (MPC) with Xvid external codecs. This plays 99% of the common formats.

 

MusikCUbe, that one I've never heard of, I'll give it a go. Thanks for all the suggestions guys
All the best

 

Zoom Player with InMatrix Codec Guide for video and general playback.
foobar2000 for audio playback and audio-related tasks.
Burrrn for Audio-CD burning.

 

vlc for video and windows media player 11 for audio.

 

Media Player Classic with Vista Codec Pack (see sig)

or

GOM Player

 

can you install musikcube on a usb pen?
lodore

 

Foobar (extremely customizable) and MusikCube are the best ones for windows.

For *nix, mpd is the way to go (with either sonata or ncmpc for a front-end)

I think you can, but it is pretty pointless, because unless you carry your entire music collection with you, there is nothing to play. Musikcube is more of a media collection organizer and player, rather than a play one file kind of thing

Alphalutra1

 

Media Player Classic

 

foobar2000 (i hardly notice it's there) and VLC for movies, or WMP

 

I use foobar, and MPUI for video.
http://mpui.sourceforge.net/

 

Another vote for MPC, supports every media file i have

 

Thanks for all the great suggestions. All great players . Tough choice. In the end, after trying them all, I went with VLC for vids and DVDs, and foobar2000 for music. Both run light and smooth, and between the two I can play every format I have. I also like the fact that foobar has an "Album list", that you can just add folders to with having to create playlists. Now I can finally get Winamp and Asus DVD off my machine. Thanks again guys.