Windows Media Video V RealPlayer
 

What to provide the members with?
Which as the biggest user platform?
Pros and cons?



Personally I hate RealPlayer but see alot of sites using it, WMA seems less complicated and easier to use

I hate RealPlayer.

Not that that helps you any.

Windows Media is superior in a number of ways:
- better compression algorithm = clearer streaming at just about any bandwidth level
- better market penetration, since it comes bundled with MS OS's
- Real's new marketing concept is basically throw as many ads as possible at users whenever they try to play a freakin video
- Real's support sucks ass (or at least it used to - the adult vid. streaming company I used to work for dumped them last summer, because of poor support and extremely high licensing fees....)

If you are going to do the streaming yourself, I'd go with WM. If you are just looking to add 3rd party streams to your sites, then I'd say give your members a bit of both, because there will always be users who prefer Real over WM (mainly due to an anti-microsoft bias, I think)

Anyway that's my :2 cents:
(well maybe more like 10 cents at the length of this post... sorry, too much coffee this morning)

Real is a communist software program that ROBS you of the ability to CHOOSE what file types you open with what program! That and it SUCKS at video decoding!

Windows Media may be backed by Microsoft, but I still like it! My #2 favorite video player, after quicktime that is!

we offer all different formats.......and let the purchaser choose what format.....


we provide the following formats:
Real Media Player G2 - Quick Time 4.0 - Windows Media 7.0
Each in both High and Low Band Formats


most WM's choose windows media from our content

Shit d00d !!!
That is way too much work !! That is like optimizing your websites for Nutscrape and webTV ... for the extra 3 people you might cater too .... it ain't worth it !!! :1orglaugh

WMV gets my vote .... if the surfer has WINDOZE ... he has a WMV player already ..... simple

BTW ... play a clip in RealPlayer, and open your resource monitors ...
Then do the same in Windows Media ...
REALPLAYER is a resource PIG !!!:feels-hot

Real Player sucks cock. It will die within 3 years.

Here is why:

1. Real Player was created because download times took so long because everyone was on 28.8 dial-up connections.....so they made a player that could play audio/video as it came into your PC instead of waiting for the whole thing to download. Now, every day that goes by, more and more people have high speed net connections and have less need for streaming audio/video because their connection is fast enough to download and play the whole thing.

2. Windows Media Player will take over what Real Player started anyways, and its already pre-installed with every Windows PC.

agreed WMV.....

thanks for your advice/opinion hungryman..... :thumbsup

I don't build the sites, or make decisions for that site....but, I will pass along ur opinion.....

I'm mainly the production manager for the 5 star site in my sig...
BTW.....
it's "doodette" :winkwink:

i agree, fuck a .rm file. and their player.
almost everyone has windows media player and the quality that the new wm8 codecs produce are great.

I agree, i think the real player stuff thats around is mostly legacy. WMP and Quicktime are the only players to worry about supporting, realplayer is trash and you can directly correlate the state of their company with how hard it is to use their "free" product without wading through all the bullshit. I love their new fake 'messenging system' where they can spam your desktop at any time and popup a window. WMP comes with the OS, as much as it sucks for someone to gain the upper hand that way, its still true and besides that the product is far superior anyway in all the ways previously mentioned.:2 cents:

RM files suck balls. You can't convert them back to avi or mpg which suck and rm files take allot more resources. Microsoft pretty much owns the world so wmv files are standard but divx it better.

i dont like how you cant play divx movies as you're downloading them, personally. unless you know a way to do that?

i tell you i was only laughing about this with a mate yesterday... *sigh*.. it's so good to be on the other side of the browser "war" you remember when it was 50/50? you'd spend 20 min building a site and then 2 hours making sure it was cross compatible? lol :) (well if there was much dhtml anyways)..

i am prettty sure you can't convert .wmv's int .mpg's either