What's the best media player for playing pieces of movie files?

July 8, 2007 11:48 PM

What's the best media player for playing pieces of movie files?

For example, if I have 600 megs of an 800 megabyte video file, which media player would be able to process it most accurately?

posted by matkline to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I've found Mplayer to be the best at this. Download the MPlayer package, and the package of codecs for it. In Windows, I generally then make a shortcut to Mplayer.exe on my desktop and drag video files onto it, and it does a pretty good job playing "incomplete" files.

However, it varies from file to file. Videos in the .AVI container format are notoriously difficult to play if you don't have the whole thing, although if you have the beginning of the file you can usually get some results.
posted by Jimbob at 11:52 PM on July 8, 2007

VLC. Never failed me yet.
posted by jourman2 at 11:55 PM on July 8, 2007

I rather like The KMPlayer myself.
posted by fusinski at 12:09 AM on July 9, 2007

If it's an .avi file, there was a program called AVIPreview that used to be distributed with Kazaa 5 years ago. Back in the day it did the trick, but I haven't touched it since then so your mileage may vary.
posted by charmston at 12:51 AM on July 9, 2007

Seconding VLC. Amazing program that is fast, plays everything and plays it well.
posted by pollystark at 1:32 AM on July 9, 2007

In my experience, I've been able to get MPlayer to play more weird, non-standard files than VLC. But to be fair, VLC has been able to play the occasional file that MPlayer hasn't. Both are great tools to have, and both are free.
posted by Jimbob at 1:42 AM on July 9, 2007

VLC is your best-bet for Windows and OS X.
posted by vkxmai at 7:16 AM on July 9, 2007