Is it just me, or do all of you find Windows Media Player * incredibly irritating and bad? *.
My configuration:
G4/450, 512 RAM, 9.04.
Here’s my problem, which occurs with ALL movies from ALL sources that I try to play on WMP, and that emphatically includes movies I’m trying to run directly from my hard drive:
The audio (if there is any) is fine, goes along smoothly with nary a pause anywhere. The video NEVER EVER runs smoothly. It ALWAYS stops, pauses a long time, then rushes really fast, then skips a chunk, then pauses a long time, then rushes really fast, skips a chunk, it was a dark and stormy night…
You get the picture… I certainly don’t!
I have adjusted the network rates, I have added endless memory to it, I’ve taken memory away, I’ve made sure not one other thing is going on anywhere on my drive, etc.
So is it me, or does WMP for Mac just suck profoundly? [sub]And if so…that’s one more reason to DESPISE MS, since I have no problems with the rockin’ sockin’ QT or even Realplayer. But of course, god forbid there should be any successful and popular form of software that Windows doesn’t have to make WORSE and then take over the market with…[/sub]
It’s not just you, I have heard of several such cases with WMP on the Mac. Two of my Macs, a G3 300 and a 6500/250 both do not run WMP well at all. It crashes constantly and throws all kinds of errors my way. I have not, however, tried WMP on any of my other Macs. Of course, it does run wonderfully on all of my PCs (God help us the day they make WMP for my Linux box)
I have to reiterate those sentiments. WMP doesn’t work very well (when at all) on either of my Macs, back to the beta-6 versions to current. They usually lock up for no apparent reason. QT Pro works flawlessly. RealPlayer does strange things under the Mac. EVERYTHING works fine on the PC (sad). Actually, they work better on the Mac under Windows emulation than on the real PC (speed aside), but I blame that on Win98 vs. WinME.
Ah yes. I sure do love having the company I work for get routinely bashed in GQ. Take your opinions to the Pit, please. And I find it strange that you can DESPISE MS, since the Mac Office team goes out of its way to make Mac-specific Office suites that look nothing like the Windows versions, and include features that exist only on the Mac platform. Oh, and Mac Office happens to be the only group from any major Mac company to promise a new version specifically for OS X. Did Photoshop, Adobe, Quark, FileMaker or anybody else commit to making an OS X specific upgrade? No, they didn’t - you’ll have to run Classic Mode. Maybe you should despise them.
To answer the OP, although I don’t even feel like I should, why does WMP not work well on the Mac? b/c Base and Sprite based media tracks have no choice but to call QuickTime at some point since the OS will not function without it, and b/c WM is a small team and they don’t have time to reverse engineer everything to get WM to call QT properly, which happens to completely change all the time from one rev to the next, with no support from Apple to help with the new Carbon Events whatsoever.
And I am surprised that you have no problems with RealPlayer on the Mac - it’s been my experience that it is just as inconsistent as WMP, for the same reasons I mentioned above.
This all sounds good and well as far as feasibilities, but QuickTime works perfectly. Most Mac programs that use QuickTime work perfectly (as far as using QuickTime). So, logically, QuickTime can’t be the real culprit. Please note that I’m not MS-bashing; while Windows is a piece of junk, I love Office and Explorer for the Mac.
Dooku, I for one am glad that the Macintosh Division of Microsoft is doing what it’s doing. I’m not an MS Office user (except Excel), but I still benefit indirectly (it makes the Mac platform more acceptable to Office shops, and causes more people to take the Mac seriously).
Regarding WMP–I have no complaints with performance, my complaint is that it doesn’t open much of anything that MoviePlayer won’t open already.
I hate it when folks send me AVI files. I am so sick and tired of “cannot find the proper codec” error messages. Do Windows users have to deal with that, or are the codecs available for the Macintosh simply ancient and out of date?
Why doesn’t WMP come with the latest codec extensions, anyhow?
I sure with everyone would standardize on MPEG and can all the other formats@!!
Ahem… Perhaps you should have seen the recent MacWorld keynote where alongside demos of carbonized apps from Microsoft, previews from Adobe, Quark, etc, were displayed, along with Filemaker which is already carbonized.
The reason people despise MS and WMP in particular, is because it is one of the central issues of the DoJ antitrust trial. Microsoft lost the case as much over its handling of media codecs and players as it lost for its handling of Java and Netscape. Microsoft’s notorious “knife the baby” tactics continue unto this day, making a horrible battle over incompatible proprietary codecs for Real, Quicktime, and WMP. We should be all interoperable but due to MS’s tactics, we are not. Thanks Bill!
Balthisar, yes, QT works perfectly on the Mac. AVIs work perfectly on Windows. Non-QT media formats on the Mac do not work well, just like QuickTime doesn’t work as well in Windows. There’s no culprit here, it’s just different OSs handling media streams differently.
I wish like hell there could be a standardized format, but it’s not that simple, and it has nothing to do with some sort of horrible battle over imcompatible proprietary codecs. Although I love that - we’re a monopoly b/c we illegally incorporated one type of browser over another, and we suck b/c we incorporate too many incompatible different codecs - what should we do - only allow ony media format? What do you think would happen if we did that?
Chas.E, what you saw from Adobe, Quark and Filemaker at Macworld were “aquafied” but not carbonized. IOW, they “look” like OfficeX apps, but do not take advantage of the Carbon structure underneath - they are Cocoa apps. All Mac Devs pretty much know each other from ADCs and whatnot, and we all had a good laugh about Steve’s comments about everyone’s committment to carbon during his keynote.
RE: the DOJ, I cannot talk about this at all, not even anonymously in here.
And I realize why people despise MS, believe me, more than anyone in here I do, I just don’t appreciate getting to read all about it in GQ. Knife the baby. Lovely. Thanks Chas!
FileMaker Pro (the client version) for MacOS X is a Carbon application. It is far more than “aquafied”, it runs natively in OS X, not in the Classic environment.
Filemaker Pro Server for MacOS X is a Cocoa app, which means that it was entirely recoded in Objective C and does not need to “take advantage of the Carbon structure underneath”, a phrase that doesn’t make much sense anyhow.
Carbon=a subset of the conventional Macintosh APIs that eliminates non-reentrant codes, therefore allowing the OS to treat it as a bunch of separate threads in a preemptive multitasking / protected memory environment. Mainly a rather glorious and well-executed hack for bringing existing Macintosh applications into the MacOS X world.
Cocoa=a modernization of the NeXT / OpenStep code, designed from the ground up to take full advantage of the operating system’s architecture. Or (to throw some confusion in the works) a Java application for MacOS X. Why Java is considered part of the same “layer” as the Objective-C NeXT type programs, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s where Cocoa gets its name, in case you ever wondered. Cocoa was also once known as the Yellow Box.
Classic=a single (albeit massive) OS X program that does for MacOS X and MacOS 7/8/9 programs what Wine does for Unix on PCs and Windows programs: it emulates the environment that those programs need and expect in order to execute, without having to emulate the hardware platform (because it is the same hardware). Classic in its entirety, viewed as a program, benefits from Mac OS X functionalities such as symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking, protected memory, and so on. The programs within Classic, however, are in the same boat they’d be in if they were running in MacOS 9.1–which they are, in fact; MacOS 9.1 actually boots up from scratch within the Classic environment. Classic was also once known as the Blue Box.
I’m not trying to start a platform war, I’m just stating the problem. Streaming media’s biggest problem is codec and player standards, and it’s a hotly contested standard.
AHunter3, thanks for the explanation for the benefit of the thread readers - I assumed everyone in here knew the difference or the subject wouldn’t have interested them.
My “take advantage of the Carbon structure underneath” was an oversimplification, obviously, as well as a poorly worded sentence. I was trying to say that the demos at MacWorld were not fully carbonized - they were just made to look that way - aquafied only. FileMaker Pro was as carbonized, at that time, as Movie Player. It may be further along now, but at MacWorld it was not. What Adobe and Quark had at Macworld were older Cocoa mockups.
They probably had their techies locked in the basement until they finished it. FileMaker for X is out now, and I’ll vouch for it. I can work in it all day, supporting a mixture of Mac and Windows FileMaker users, and never hit any icky “beta software” / half-hacked regions.
Can’t speak of Server, as I haven’t used the X Server (or the Red Hat version of FileMaker Server, also theoretically out now), but FileMaker is pretty good about not putting software on the shelves until it is ready for use. (Except Web Companion; don’t get me started on that!).
That may or may not be true, but you have the terminology backwards. “Carbonization” means taking an existing app using existing APIs, and getting it to work under MacOS X. Carbonized apps should thus also work under OS9.x.
“Cocoa” is what we WANT to have, mockups or otherwise. Cocoa apps are written using the new, modern (relative to the ToolBox) API’s, with no legacy (relatively-speaking again) code.
Again, I don’t hate Microsoft, and don’t give a crap about their monopolies (unless I have to buy a computer without the option to not buy their OS). I love their software. They make better Mac software than they do Windows software. I’d have to guess that their Mac programmers are also Mac-lovers, and they’re not handicapped by their own, crappy OS.
I’ll stick to my guns about the quality of WMP for the Mac, though. Sure, I’d love it to work right. But WMP doesn’t meet the quality standards that we expect from good Microsoft software like Office:2000 or Internet Explorer.
On the Windows platform, the only problem I’ve had with QT is the stupid ActiveX problem that MS intentionally introduced to force compliance with the own technology. Okay, this could be anti-competitive, but I’m done worrying about the monopoly. To be fair, though, I only have the “free” QT on the PC-side, so I don’t know if the “advanced” features have a problem or not.
I’m glad you try to defend your company, mindlessly or not. When asked, I’ll defend the Ford Explorer the same way!
Yes, Cocoa is what we will all strive for - I didn’t mean that since the Adobe and Quark demos were older Cocoa mockups they were inferior than Carbon versions; it’s just that we had all seen them before during YellowBox ADCs.
I don’t want Dopers to get the wrong idea here: Yes, Carbon Apps can have both APIs and therefore run in both places, but most major Mac software players that are going to release an OS X version of their suite are not going to allow for that version to run under OS 9.x, so don’t buy that version thinking it will run in both places.
I’ll take us as an example: although we could have both the old (OS 9) and new (X) APIs in the same Carbonized program, we are not doing it, b/c we have a perfectly good version out right now for OS 9, and it wouldn’t make sense for us to release a bunch of much-larger Application Files (we’re all on filesize alert around here) that can do both. Plus, in our case, the Installer architecture (creating Extensions, Prefs AND PList files) would have been an enormous undertaking.
BBEdit 6.1 - nope, comes as two different versions
FileMaker - nope, comes as two different versions
GraphicConverter - download once, run in either OS
iCab - download once, run in either OS
Eudora - download once, run in either OS
vMac - download once, run in either OS
Stuffit Expander / DropStuff - download once, runs in either OS
Looks like some do, some don’t, and I would guess the likelihood decreases as a function of the complexity of the program and, therefore, the likelihood of needing to speak to some aspect of the environment that differs too much between environments. The Carbon GraphicConverter is glitchy under conventional MacOS; it can’t do a Save As of an existing file, and isn’t reliable printing.
Eudora, on the other hand, is solid as a rock in either environment. I kept my copy of 5.0 around, but as days go by I’m coming closer and closer to tossing it, as the Carbon version works fine in my (still standard for everyday work) conventional MacOS environment.
By the way, Carbon isn’t merely backwards-compatible with 9.x – I use 8.6, quite possibly the most stable and solid of any of the pre-X operating systems released by Apple, at least since System 4.0 at any rate.
Cleophus:
Ummm…if you aren’t sharing your computer with other users, I see no reason to use 9.anything except as the Classic environment for X. MacOS 8.6 is the rock of Gibraltar; Nine has edges that are still bleeding, and they aren’t even particularly new edges any more.
(God help us the day they make WMP for my Linux box)