media-player posts

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Open Source

MonitorES pauses media playback, adjusts IM status when your PC is locked

by Brad Linder Oct 19th 2009

MonitorES is a tiny Windows application that lets you adjust the behavior of some running applications when you lock your PC. For instance, you can adjust MonitorES to show a screen saver or turn off your monitor to save electricity.

The utility also lets you automatically update your instant messenger status, mute your system, and pause playback of 16 different media players including Winamp, Foobar, and Windows Media Player. As for IM clients, MonitorES supports Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Digsby, and Miranda.

When you login to your computer again, media playback will resume, your IM status will be updated, and of course your screen will turn back on.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: im, lock, media-player, monitores

Filed under: Utilities, Windows

Media Keyboard adds multimedia keyboard support to VLC, Winamp Classic

by Brad Linder Jan 24th 2009

Over the last few years a number of computer makers have put out keyboards with special multimedia buttons that let you pause, play, stop, or skip when playing music or videos. And that's fine if you want to use the keyboard to control Windows Media Player. But if you have another Media Player like VLC, Xion, XMPlay, 1by1, or old school apps like Winamp Classic, you're generally out of luck.

Media Keyboard 2 is a free Windows utility that adds support for all of those media players, plus a few more. Just install Media Keyboard and run it and you should be able to control each media player using your multimedia keys. You can register the app to start with Windows if you expect to use this feature a lot.

Make sure not to change the hotkeys for the media player or your multimedia keys may stop working. Of course, if you're using a media player like VLC that supports hotkeys, you may not find much need for the mutlimedia keys in the first place.

[via gHacks

Tags: media-keyboard, media-keyboard-2, media-player, multimedia-keyboard, vlc

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Songbird 1.0 RC1 now available

by Brad Linder Nov 5th 2008

Open source, Mozilla-based media player Songbird is inching closer to version 1.0. This week the team behind the cross-platform application made the first release candidate of Songbird 1.0 available.

So what's new in the latest build? First up, Songbird 1.0 RC1 uses GStreamer to handle media playback whether you're running the Windows, Mac, or Linux version of the program. The Songbird team says that should mean better performance and reliability. The latest build also includes a number of performance enhancements, including the ability to import media into Songbird more than twice as fast as before.

Here are a few of the other changes/improvements in Songbird 1.0 RC1:

Users can also drag and drop images to add album art to a song.
Addition of new keyboard shortcuts
Smart Playlists can be used as rules within other Smart Playlists
Improved search speed
Faster startup times
Scrolling large libraries is more efficient

While this is a release candidate, which means it's a bit more stable than your typical beta software, there are still a number of known bugs and issues. You can read the complete list in the release notes.

Tags: media-player, mozilla, music, songbird, songbird-1.0, songbird-1.9-rc1

Filed under: Audio, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source

VLC 0.9.2 released: New interface, better codec support

by Brad Linder Sep 15th 2008

The developers behind the popular open source VLC media player have released VLC 0.9.2. The update brings a new user interface for Mac, Linux, and Windows versions of the player. One feature I'm extremely happy to see are playback controls that show up when watching a video in full screen mode.

There are also new, simplified settings menus, and new filters. VLC 0.9.2 adds to the already long list of video formats supported. While VLC 0.8.6 could play FLV files, I find that the new version does a much better job. For example, I downloaded a YouTube video as an FLV and tried to play it in each version. VLC 0.8.6 opened and played the video, but when I tried to skip ahead, it closed the video file. VLC 0.9.2 had no problem starting the same file from any point in the timeline.

VLC 0.9.2 also supports playback of YouTube, Google Video , and Daily Motion videos by entering their URLs. As previously reported, the media player also now works with last.fm.

The VLC wiki is being hammered at the moment, but you should be able to find a list of some other other features in the latest release at the What is cool in 0.9 page. And you can check out a video of VLC 0.9.2 in action after the break.

Tags: media-player, videolan, vlc, vlc-0.9.2

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Mozilla, Open Source

Songbird 0.7 RC1 is out: Mozilla-based music player is growing up

by Brad Linder Aug 4th 2008

Songbird, the music player built on Mozilla is inching a bit closer towards a 1.0 release. Last night the developers pushed Songbird 0.7 Release Candidate 1 out of the nest, and it includes a whole slew of updates including improved memory usage, UI refinements, and a new setup assistant that makes it easy to import media libraries and configure Songbird to work with an iPod or other portable media player.

Here are a few more of the changes:

Support for iTunes-like smart playlists
Optional concert calendar displays upcoming shows in your area based on the artists in your music library
Last.fm support allows you to scrobble tracks
Now uses GStreamer as the media core
Faster metadata scanning

If you haven't used Songbird before, here are a few others reasons you might want to check it out. First, it's kind of like having a cross-platform version of iTunes that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux but also supports multiple tabs. Second, you can use Songbird as a web browser and when you visit pages with links to MP3 files like The Hype Machine, Songbird will automatically detect the music files and bring up links for you to play those tracks.

The latest version seems much faster and more stable than earlier versions.

[via gHacks]

Tags: itunes, media-player, music, songbird, songbird-0.7, songbird-0.7-rc1

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Freeware

Evil Player: Light weight audio player for Windows

by Brad Linder Jul 14th 2008

Free media players for Windows are a dime a dozen these days. Or umm, no dimes, because they're free. But while some media players try to set themselves apart from the crowd by piling on the features, Evil Player goes the opposite route. This media player has the simplest interface we've ever seen. Yet it still has most of the features you could need including support for streaming audio, global hotkeys, and playlists.

What Evil Player doesn't include is a flashy player window. There aren't even dedicated play, pause, stop, forward or rewind buttons. To access most features you either need to right-click on the player window or on the system tray icon.

You have a choice of installing Evil Player or downloading an installation-free file which you can run from any directory or load onto a flash drive. Our favorite not-quite hidden feature? When you install the application one of the language packs you can choose is called "Elmer Fudd." We'll let you figure out what it does.

[via The Portable Freeware Collection]

Tags: evil-player, media-player, music, portable

Filed under: Video, Windows, Open Source

Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition: All in one media player

by Brad Linder Jul 11th 2008

Media Player Classic is an audio and video player for Windows that looks like Windows Media Player 6.4, but works a bit more like all-in-one media application VLC. Each application is open source, and each can handle almost any audio or video file you throw at it. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition takes the basic version of MPC and adds a few extra features, including:

Support for additional decoders, including H.264 and VC-1 with DXVA support
Improved support for Windows Vista, including a 64 bit release
Translation into additional languages

The media player takes up just a few megabytes and doesn't require installation, so you can throw it on a USB flash drive and carry it around with you.

[via gHacks]

Tags: media-player, media-player-classic, media-player-classic-home-cinema-edition

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Open Source

aTunes: Cross platform, open source media player

by Brad Linder Jun 23rd 2008

Looking for an iTunes/Winamp/Amarok killer? No matter whether you're a Windows, Linux, or OS X user, you might want to check out aTunes. This media player uses the open source MPlayer engine and is built on Java, which means you can run it on pretty much any devices that supports Java. There's also a Windows installer which makes running aTunes on Windows a snap.

The program has all the features you'd expect from a modern media player, including the ability to play MP3, ogg, WMA, WAV, FLAC, MP4, RA, and RM files. You can also listen to internet radio streams. There's no support for DRM though, so if you've got restricted music files on your desktop, this might not be the player for you.

One of the niftiest features in aTunes is Last.fm integration. While you can't use the software to play music from Last.fm, you can sign into your account and submit your played song list to Last.fm. aTunes also takes advantage of Last.fm's audioscrobbling service, which means you can see a list of artists that are similar to the one you're listening to in real-time. When available, aTunes will also automatically display album art and song lyrics.

Update: It appears the web site is down, but you can still download aTunes from SourceForge.

Tags: atunes, media-player

Filed under: Audio, Video, Windows, Freeware, Open Source

Kantaris media player makes VLC pretty

by Brad Linder Jan 23rd 2008

While Videolan Client (also known as VLC) is a great cross-platform application for opening pretty much any video file you can throw at it, the interface is a bit sparse. Sure, you can add custom skins, but developer Christofer Persson decided to go a bit further and build a whole new program based on the open-source media player's code.

Kantera is an audio/video player that can handle all of the same media formats as VLC and then some. It features an attractive skin, some trippy audio visualizations, and integration with Last.fm and Apple movies trailers. While the Kantera homepage touts the program's ability to handle audio codecs that VLC won't normally play, we've never had any problem opening WMA or other closed source file formats with VLC.

Kantaris doesn't appear to have support for hotkeys yet, which is a bit of a drawback. But version 0.3.0 which was released this week adds support for playing archived RAR files without extracting them first which is a pretty awesome feature. Kantaris is only available for Windows, but the source code is available so we wouldn't be surprised to see a Mac or Linux port sometime down the road.

[via Sourceforge]

Tags: kantaris, media-player, vlc

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