player

AK-Player is a media player designed to allow offline viewing of streaming video files (such as those on YouTube). By moving the streaming video feed from a temporary area to a regular folder, AK-Player essentially lets you download, save, and replay streaming video any time you want (something most Windows video players can't do, as they don't support the streaming video formats). The application installs easily.

The AK-Player interface is clean and easy to work with. A nice feature of AK-Player is the capability to trigger a search on your drives for videos that may be saved in … Read more

Favor DVD Player for Mac is a utility for playing and ripping DVDs. Supporting all DVD formats, Favor DVD Player for Mac lets you watch your DVDs on your MacBook or iMac. Even better, Favor DVD Player for Mac lets you rip DVDs to formats for your Mac or portable iDevice, as well as Apple TV.

Favor DVD Player for Mac downloads and installs easily. The interface has preset defaults for the most common settings, and a simple interface for watching DVDs. We watched a wide variety of disks, in numerous formats, and all played properly. We also ripped a … Read more

Just like canned beer, MP3s are cheap, convenient, and sold just about everywhere, but the quality doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. If you want to hear every detail in your music -- every breath, every strum, every rattle -- then a lossless format such as FLAC is the way to go.

The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is capable of reducing the size of uncompressed audio sources by 40 percent to 50 percent without any degradation in sound quality. You can find free programs for Mac, Windows, and Linux that will play and rip FLAC files, but finding a FLAC-compatible MP3 player isn't quite so easy.

It's possible that you already own a FLAC-compatible audio player and don't realize it -- check your manufacturer's support page for firmware updates that could enable FLAC and provide other improvements. If you own an older iPod, the open-source Rockbox firmware offers FLAC audio playback, custom EQ, games, and tons of little surprises. Meanwhile if you own an iPod Touch or an iPhone, there are several apps available from the App Store that will let you play and upload FLAC files. Read our FLAC FAQ here.… Read more

In the late 1990s, one of the original portable music file formats -- the MP3 -- was causing quite a bit of bother. It had earned itself a reputation as a pirate format, and this was mainly due to the sharing site Napster, which was at the height of its notoriety. While MP3 inevitably prevailed, there is a much better choice for high-quality music, and it's gaining in popularity.

FLAC is a musical file format that offers bit-perfect copies of CDs at half the size, and is compatible with many phones (including the iPhone -- with an app), MP3 … Read more

Flip4Mac WMV Player is used to play Windows .WMV files on your MacBook or iMac. Since WMV files are ubiquitous on the Internet, the ability to play these files natively without converting them is a nice feature. Flip4Mac WMV Player plays WMV files through QuickTime, so any application that supports QuickTime can be used to play WMV files, including Mac-supported Web browsers like Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

Flip4Mac WMV Player is free, although there is limited functionality unless you upgrade to the full Pro (or higher) version. Flip4Mac WMV Player Pro has some conversion capabilities, so you can convert WMV … Read more

Media Player Classic-Home Cinema (MPC-HC for short) is a true classic among media players. It can play nearly every media file format, both audio and video, and also plays DVD content. With its old-school interface and widespread customizability, it may not be the best choice if you're looking for a click-and-forget player for video and audio files. But those who require more control over their media playback will appreciate the extra options MPC-HC offers. Since this program is lightweight, it's compatible with nearly every Windows edition since 98 (which it still supports). Moving forward in time, MPC-HC is … Read more

With Apple's new round of iPods comes a fresh round of questions about the usefulness of dedicated MP3 players. Smartphones these days can all hold a decent amount of MP3s and we carry them with us wherever we go. Do we need a portable device just for music?

The excitement surrounding new iPods is a fraction of that surrounding new iPhones, but Apple keeps dutifully updating the line with new colors, shapes, and capabilities. There are still plenty of other MP3 players from other brands available, too.

I have an old-generation iPod Touch that sits in an alarm clock … Read more

I may have gushed a bit too much about Jasmine, a free YouTube app for the iPad, when I wrote about it last month. The app is unquestionably slick and packed with features, but the more I've used it the past couple of weeks, the more annoyed I've grown by the number of videos that it can't play. It feels like a game of Russian roulette anytime I try to play a music video with Jasmine: sometimes I win when it plays the video, and sometimes I lose when I get a black screen with a message … Read more

Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a free utility that provides video playback. Since there are a lot of video players on the market, this is a tough area for apps to really stand out from the competition. With a few performance issues and some operational quirks, Media Player Classic Home Cinema didn't come out at the top of the long list of similar programs.

The installation process is simple enough, although there's about a half dozen screens to step through. Once installed, Media Player Classic Home Cinema launches quickly, although there's no modification to the pop-up … Read more