Why is it that there are so many different types of media players around?
Or more to the point, so many formats that require you to download a different player to be able to view media on certain websites?.
Some sites give you a choice of either WMP or Real Player, but others seem to only support Quicktime.
Considering that these players take up a fair bit of space on your HDD when you d/load them, is there one that does the whole lot?.

It's just the same sort of reasons as why we had so many different competing audio and video tape formats in earlier times. Different people developed different competing systems, and as yet there has been no general move to standardize on any one particular format.

Some players offer various "plug ins" to be able to display varying formats. Both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player provide this facilities, although to differing degrees.

Mike, I know as much about players as you, but I think, different extentions show different uses of a sound file. Wav is a small, sign sound, and mp3 is able to give you music in a very good quality. To listen to music in digital, you have to compress the music information, which always causes worse quality. This transformation can be done in several ways, can end up in different file formats, but the better the quality, the higher the file size. And the same with the video.

In my opinion listening to music, people should sit down by a record or cd player, with an average hi-fi system, and for all else you can use the computer.

I alway load VLC Player on friends PCs for watching various media files. It works with most stuff you'll encounter, including DVIX/XVID/MPEG4 encoded AVI files. Plays DVD movies too. It works with pretty much any platform you are likely to have at home.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

And its free.

The biggest problem I seem to have is with video files. There seems to be dozens of codecs they get compressed with.

I do dissagree with the idea that CDs tapes or any other little bit of plastic is better than listening to a digital file. As he said, it is just a matter of compression and thus file size. A WAV is CD quality sound. My old tin ear can't tell the difference between a WAV and a 128kb MP3 file, a tenth the size. Unless you are listening in a sound conditioned room on about $10,000 worth of equipment you can't either.
I haven't actually used CDs or tapes for anything but "ripping" since the turn of the century. I have 4 MP3 players (2 cars, the house and the pool bar). All are DOS based P166 PCs running MPXPLAY.

[This message has been edited by gfretwell (edited 12-02-2005).]