viewing my movies...

[the_shyguy]

hi... from an overall quality point of view, what is the best media player to watch my vids (.avi and .mpg)? at the moment i have just been using windows media player 9. but i have heard ppl speak about vlan and media player classic?

i also have the inervideo windvd 4 on my computer...

so which is the best?

ps. i have the following latest codecs installed - divX, Xvid, AC3 Filter.

[tweedledee]

I think the best way is to look at them both and say, "hey, I like that." or "that's crap, I'll go back to the other" because only you know what you like.

[daamon]

Yeah, I'm with Bill (insider knowledge...) - You could also check out the "Video Players" section in the "Tools" page and read reviews / refer to the ratings...

[tweedledee]

Yeah, I'm with Bill

Pommie bastard

[mats.hogberg]

All around, I'd say Media Player Classic, but for DVD (and mpegs) I often use PowerDVD (or WinDVD, but that one just crashes on my system). For AVIs there's Playa, ZoomPlayer... In general, anything but WMP.

/Mats

[lordsmurf]

PowerDVD or WinDVD

[northcat_8]

I use WinDVD. I also have PowerDVD but I just like WinDVD better.

I use WMP2 to view any video files other than DVD and the MAC videos.

WMP9 sucks...in my opinion.

[Suntan]

VLC (VideoLan) and MPC are "stand alone" players. They use there own codecs to decompress/play the video streams. MPC uses the Libavcodec (I am pretty sure) which is an opensource MPEG2 and MPEG4, as well as other things, codec. Not sure what VLC uses.

Directshow players like WMP, Zoomplayer, BSPlayer, Winamp, etc. all use the same directshow codecs you have install on your PC (divX, Xvid, AC3 Filter in your case). So there really isn't a difference in PQ between these types as the quality has more to do with the codecs you use. That said, there are many advantages to players like Zoomplayer (my favorite) and BSplayer over WMP. Mostly because M$ is more interested in tracking what you play in WMP than the flexibility of the player, while Blight (maker of Zoomplayer) is interested in making the best player for the user. I highly suggest you check out Zoomplayer.

Lastly, for Xvid (.avi) and .mpg playback I prefer to use ffDshow. It too is based on the Libavcodec and gives great PQ, and is usually less resource hungery compaired to Divx and Xvid's own Codecs. I would suggest using Athos' builds as they have always been stable for me. You can get it here. Just try out the lastest one he has up. On top of using the Libavcodec, ffDshow also comes with many powerful postprocessing filters like sharpening, denoising, color adjustment, etc. etc. It also allows you to use Dscaler for deinterlacing and AVIsynth filters for unlimited filter application. Heavy use of filters takes a beefy machine, but if you have the horsepower it really can make a difference. One really nice feature with ffDshow is that you can adjust the strengh of the deblocking and deringing (vs the default Xvid and Divx options).

To learn about all the options of ffDshow I suggest looking through the forums on www.Doom9.org. They really have vast amounts of information on how to best set them up. And if you really want to get a look at fanatical levels of tweaking look at the HTPC forum on www.avsforum.com

In Short: Zoomplayer with ffDshow (both are freeware btw)

-Suntan