Evil Player

Evil Player is a music player, supporting WAV, OGG, MP1, MP2, MP3, MOD, XM, IT, S3M, MTM, UMX, and MO3. It supports radio streaming via SHOUTcast, ICEcast, and ICEcast2. Its also free. The interface is very minimal . It supports adding either individual songs or directories. The bars on the right are about all its got for a visualizer, but you can’t really argue with memory usage, with no songs loaded it uses about 5 megs.

 

 

 

 

 

There is a search feature, so you can load your entire library into the player and search through it(it searches quickly and instantly). It can edit tags.

 

 

 

 

It has a huge number of options. It has:

Last.FM integration(if enabled)

Transparency(user controlled)

Playlist support(M3U)

History Support

A huge number of languages

Audio device choice

Hotkeys

Proxies for Internet Radio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, my favorite, Slim Mode, so if you have a playlist that you like, you can just set it going. Especially with transparency, it can almost disappear.

Evil Player is available here, at 480k.

VLC, revisted

Remember vlc? Well, a fairly big new version came out recently. Its got a new look:

Its got a new media menu:

The new open menu finally shows you the available files!

 

It supports video capture devices(webcams):

The preferences have been organized(yay!) and are easier to work with:

There is also even better codec support(if possible). It now auto-downloads music albums, and checks for updated. There is also an onscreen menu in fullscreen mode on the pc version(the mac version has had it for a while).

Its available(and as always, free) here.

VLC

So, as promised in my last post, today's post is all about VLC, a free, opensource, and cross-platform media player available at VideoLan. VLC is minimalistic, with a simple, small interface.

Opening any file in VLC will cause its window to expand to accommodate the media file.

(Video is blanked out)

VLC also has a huge number of options for playback, post-processing, output, and more.

The entire interface is completely skinnable.

It can also play internet and network video streams.

Overall VLC is a program with many pros and very few cons. The only con I have found is that the fullscreen mode does not include the normal playback information that is found in other media players.

Vista Codecs

So you just got a new computer, or you reinstalled windows on your old one. You copied over all of your files, double-click on a video file, and are told that it can't be played. This usually means you need the codec for that video file. This is where Vista Codecs comes in. Available here, it will install most of the codecs that you could possibly use, including:

DivX

Ogg

Xvid

Mpeg 4

As well as many others. It should make just about anything playable by windows media player. Alternately, you could try media players with these codecs built in, such as VLC or Media Player Classic, which will be in two posts next week.