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Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player  is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued.

In addition to being a media player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to compact discs, build Audio CDs in recordable discs and synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enables users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores. Windows Media Player replaced an earlier piece of software simply called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback.

The default file formats are Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Systems Format (ASF), and supports its own XML based playlist format called Windows Playlist (WPL). The first generation Zune software (but not the current second generation software) which actually is a modified version of Windows Media Player, additionally supports AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio, MPEG-4 and H.264 video formats out-of-the-box. The player is also able to utilize a digital rights management service in the form of Windows Media DRM.

 

Power DVD Player

CyberLink PowerDVD is a commercial video player and music player for Microsoft Windows and Turbolinux . It enables the viewing of High-Definition Video and DVD-Video movies on the user's PC. The player can also be used to play videos and audio/music files in other formats encoded with different codecs, for instance WMV-HD, DivX, XviD, and DVD-Audio, MP3 and AAC audio. The software offers full Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD playback with menus, with CPRM DRM support. However, HD DVD support is dropped with the release of PowerDVD 8.

 

RealPlayer

RealPlayer  is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.

The first version of RealPlayer was introduced in April 1995 as RealAudio Player, one of the first media players capable of streaming media over the Internet. Version 6 of RealPlayer was called RealPlayer G2; version 9 was called RealOne Player. Free "Basic" versions have been provided as well as paid "Plus" versions with additional features. On Windows, version 9 subsumed the features of the separate program RealJukebox.

RealPlayer 11 was released for Windows in November 2007. A beta release of version 11 is also available for Mac OS X. In addition, stable versions of RealPlayer are also available for Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian OS. The program is powered by an underlying open source media engine called Helix.

 

Xing Player

Xing Technology was founded in Arroyo Grande, California in 1989 by former networking executive Howard Gordon on the basis of a simple (i.e. slow) JPEG decoding library that he had developed. This software attracted the attention of Chris Eddy, a Texan who had developed a technique for processing discrete cosine transforms (DCT) very quickly through software. Eddy's technique begat the first Xing MPEG video player, a very simple MS-DOS application that could play back an I-frame-only video MPEG stream encoded at a constant quantization level at 160x120 resolution. Not impressive by today's standards, but quite an accomplishment for the Intel 386 and Intel 486 level computers of the time.

On the basis of this, Xing expanded from Gordon's home to a dedicated house (still in Arroyo Grande). Chris Eddy actually lived in the room where he worked, keeping his minimal stuff in the closet and showering at the gym next door. Xing expanded to seven employees: Laurie Beam, Tom Chen, Ken Mascaro, Rich Fife and Ray Bunnage filling out the staff in addition to Gordon and Eddy. Later on, the company moved to new offices above and to the side of a KMart down the road, gaining room to expand.

Over the next several years, Xing expanded into several directions. They added Windows support to the MS-DOS MPEG player and then created a software MPEG audio decoder (first only MP2 out of patent considerations with MP3), a real time ISA 160x120 MPEG capture board (XingIt!), a JPEG management system (Picture Prowler) and finally moved into networking, creating a handful of different products before settling down on StreamWorks, the first live 24 hour video and the first live 24 hour audio broadcast system for the internet. RealVideo appeared just before StreamWorks, but at the time it could only broadcast pre-encoded clips. It could not transmit live video. Xing experienced a period of expansion into the mid to late 90's through its MP3 software, but encountered some retraction later on, was bought out by RealNetworks in 1999 and was quickly absorbed.

Xing is also famous for being the company whose Software DVD player was hacked which allowed the DVD encryption scheme CSS out of the bag, leading to DeCSS.