There is no doubt in the minds of many that Windows Media Player is a great example of a piece of software that Microsoft has done right. There are some things that they do wrong in their operating systems and attached programs and some things they do right; most people would agree that WMP is in the latter category. However, just because it works fine already doesn’t mean that someone can’t make improvements on it and that is exactly the attitude that publisher Gabest took when he created the Media Player Classic.

Users of the old Windows operating systems will immediately recognize the layout of the MPC as being very similar to the layout used by older versions of Windows Media Player. This was done intentionally so that a person that wants to keep the familiarity but change the software can download MPC to their computer and not lose a step in their music enjoyment experience.

However, in spite of the look-alikes of the two pieces of software, there are many features that MPC has that the WMP does not. For example, MPC has real-time zoom on DVD programs as well as a dedicated section of the software for DVDs; something that is really more of an afterthought than anything else on WMP. In addition to that, the MPC supports a wide range of file formats including the infamous .ram RealVideo format that WMP seems to hate. 

All of this in a free package is quite impressive and more info can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 2:04 am and is filed under Design, Developer, Freeware, Main, Multimedia, Music, Video, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.