aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Media players

Via Dean’s World, Brian Tiemann has an exhaustive look at Mainstream Media Players and concludes:

The bottom line appears to be that Windows Media Player is a basic player with some baffling shortcomings masquerading as a full-featured media organizer; RealPlayer is a charlatan trying to be all things to all people, but failing to be anything to anybody; and QuickTime Player is a refined and velvet-smooth minimalist entrant with some jaw-droppingly awful defects of user-experience design preventing anyone from appreciating it on the basis of its strengths.

The defect he hates most is the “QuickTime Pro nag screen.” It’s the nag screen choices that bug me; I’m happy to hit “No” every time as the cost of my free player but “No” is not an option. Even after years of clicking I will still sometimes hit “Why Go Pro.” Now that makes me crazy.