The Butt Ugly Weblog

Hooray for WMV, the media "standard"

Got a Windows Media file. All of my Mac players (VLC, Quicktime, Niceplayer, WMV player) failed: all the sound was crackly and video broke down heavily.

No matter, let's go to the source, I thunk. Next, I tried Windows and Windows Media Player running under Parallels, figuring that that should at least work. Picture is fine, sound is missing. Apparently there was some strange audio codec fault and I was dismayed, not really in the mood to debug a system which otherwise was running fine.

The only media player that worked was finally VLC on Ubuntu (under Parallels, again) after installing a bunch of restricted codecs - but that was only a single command (yay apt). The only problem is that it also crashes every ten minutes, but that I can live with. At least I got sound...

Come on, Windows Media has been around for years, and it's still possible to get files which sometimes work and sometimes not? Folks, just use MP4, since it tends to play everywhere - or if you're strongly opposed to software patents and that jazz, Vorbis/Theora is a good choice, because it's easily portable and does not require licensing. And VLC plays that fine, too.

On the other hand, I was kinda happy to see that Linux seems to enjoy better multimedia player support than Mac these days, even under emulation.