Suggestions for MP4 video player

In My Humble Opinion
1

Computer video files are weird. I mean, every text document I have can be opened with Word. Every picture I have can be opened on Paint. And yet with videos, there are like 25 different formats and at least 8 players I know of and things called “codecs”, without which the video doesn’t play correctly. (Of course, the most aggravating thing is that there’s no perceptible difference in quality whatsoever, but that’s another issue.)

So now I find out that I’m getting MP4 videos, where in the past most of what I had was FLV. Now, MP4 may be a great big technological breakthrough, or it may just be some newfangled thing. Point is, I don’t know right now, because nothing I have can play an MP4 file. Which, as far as I’ve been able to discover so far, cannot be played on anything I have right now. Not Winamp, not KMPlayer, not Windows Media Player, not RealPlayer, not even the player that came with the Roxio program I bought. It’s simply not an option.

I did a little searching and found something called “AllPlayer”, which seems all right, except that there’s this process that you have to go through to get the MP4 codec, and it costs $3.00. That the process has so many layers makes me concerned, and besides that I’m reluctant to put money into something that could be cut short by a bad Internet connection or server outage or whatever. (Oh, and their download-YouTube-videos-in-any-format thing doesn’t work.)

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t mind buying one; in fact, I went to Best Buy today to attempt to do just that. Unfortunately, it seems like they don’t have any MP4 players, at least not the kind that can be installed on my Windows 7 PC, and the guy I talked to seemed puzzled that I didn’t have anything capable yet. He did suggest updating my Roxio program, but…that costs a lot of money. Don’t feel like buying a cow when all I want is a glass of milk, if you catch my drift.

Advice? I just want something that’ll play a few MP4 music videos, nothing fancy. Oh, and ixnay on any and all stupid AVI converters…it’s like trying to make a compact car by chopping up a minivan.

2

Just finished watching one using VLC. It plays everything and is very easy to use. And to find the best free software for any purpose go here.

3

Media Player Classic seems to play everything I throw at it up to and including the kitchen sink, and has a no-fuss interface. Always my player of choice. Download here (free).

4

I use PotPlayer, which is made by the same guy who originally made the KMPlayer (he sold it on to people who don’t listen to their users).

But it’s probably not the player at fault. You need a codec pack. There’s some controversies with codec packs, as they can overwrite things they shouldn’t, or if you install two different kinds it causes more problems than they solve, and plenty of people then say it’s safer to not install any at all. But then again it means you can play any file, so I dunno.

I have not installed a codec pack on my Win7 PC, and I can play mp4 files without a problem, but then I do have a lot of Adobe products, a Quicktime player, and a whole bunch of other crap, so somewhere along the line the ability to play mp4s could have arrived via any one of them.

mp4 is technically an Apple creation, so Quicktime may be your best bet to play them, or at least get the right codec installed and then subsequently get it working on any other media player.

5

mp4 isn’t a codec. It’s a container. That’s what I can’t stand about video formats. The extension tells you nothing about the codec. You can have H.264 codec in mp4, mov, flv and (I think) avi. What a mess.

6

VLC media player is a play most everything solution.

7

Sorry, to answer your question, VLC has played almost everything I’ve thrown at it, so try that first. You can try the portable version if you don’t want to install anything. If that still doesn’t work, look at the file properties or in VLC to see if you can determine the codec you need.

8

You are not trying hard enough. I have had plenty of “text” or “word processor” files that Word does not open. Try Mass-11, or AmiPro, or some fixed field text file from some mainframe system, or a UTF-32 file with LF or …
As for picture files, the list of things Paint will open (hmm .BMP, JPEG, partial GIF/PNG/TIFF support) is minuscule compared with the list of image files that you might want to open, even restricting yourself to bitmap file formats.

In other words - video files are no different. And as for why some of these files are harder to view than others - licensing. Many of the encoding schemes (H.264 in particular) requires a licensed decoder in countries that support software patents (i.e. the US). Getting the licensed decoder can be difficult in this circumstance, and unscrupulous vendors use this difficulty to gouge customers (at best) and infect users machines with malware (at worst).

So, VLC is your best bet, but it may be considered by those in the entertainment industry to be a tool for bypassing Digital Rights management and proper licensing - YMMV.

9

Kantaris is free, uses the same underlying program that VLC uses, but has a nicer interface. I highly recommend it.

10

Sorry it took me this long to get back…even on vacation, it seems there’s never enough time.

Tried VLC Media Player, even downloaded Quicktime again. VLC wouldn’t play them. Quicktime plays them…I can see the play counter…but no sound, no video.

I probably should’ve mentioned this before…these videos are from YouTube, via RealPlayer. The FLV ones I got run just fine, just the MP4s. Anything?

Oh, just so we’re clear, I’m willing to pay, so long as 1. it’s worth the money, and 2. if something goes wrong during installation, I don’t have to pay again.

11

VLC should be able to play them… that’s very weird.

I download youtube videos in HD MP4 format all the time, and use VLC or Quicktime. Both free. Just re-tested. Still fine.

Try using Video DownloadHelper to extract the files, if that’s not what you’re using:

12

Sometimes VLC doesn’t open stuff, demanding more codecs etc., but it usually does.

However I virtually always use SMPlayer2, a progression from MPlayer ( not the same as SMPlayer ), which plays most formats better than any other and can be adjusted for brightness, contrast, ratio etc. with a right-click on the fly.
It seems to be available for Microsoft systems.