First post, by keenmaster486
- Rank
- l33t
I am drowning in media players!
I have several systems capable of running Windows 9x. I'm going to categorize them thusly:
- High-end 486, DX4, and standard Pentium
- Pentium MMX (representative of which is the MMX/233)
- Low-end Pentium II/III class
- High-end Pentium III and Pentium 4
I am, right now, targeting, at minimum, the MMX/233 era systems for performance for media players. Mostly because I know I can get acceptable quality MPEG-1 video files to play on them and stream over HTTP, with caveats mentioned below...
I have tested the following media players:
For streaming media files over HTTP
- Windows Media Player 6.4: Not good. Only supports ASF and is utterly idiotic about what streams it will accept. Works on 95 and 98.
- Media Player Classic (with the K-Lite codec pack): does everything, but is very slow
- VLC 0.8.6i: Eh. It also does everything but it will slowly begin to clog the arteries of your computer the longer it remains open. Very annoying... you play a video and 5 minutes in it begins to start slowing down, until you have to stop it and restart your computer.
For just playing media files:
WMP 6.4 is probably the best here, as long as you install all the codecs you need for it. It seems to be the fastest at pretty much everything. WMP 9 also does a pretty good job! But it only works on 98SE, I think.
Can anyone recommend any other media players? I would really love something that:
- Is very fast and not resource-heavy, and doesn't cause your computer to progressively slow to a crawl the longer it remains open
- Streams media files over HTTP
- Supports the usual formats (MP3, MPEG-1/2/4, AVI, etc.)
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.