How to play Windows Media files on a Mac
There are many ways to play Windows Media files on computers running Apple’s OS X:
- Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 for Mac Os X — straight from the horses mouth. Plays Windows Media audio and video ok, streaming and files. Does not support playback of nearly as many formats as Windows Media Player for Windows.
- Flip4Mac — I haven’t tried this commercial option ($9), but these folk have apparently licensed the windows media codecs and written them as QuickTime codecs so that you can install them and then simply play back Windows Media files inside of QuickTime Player.
- VLC — a media player that plays just about every format (as well as DVDs), and can also be used to stream media from one machine to another.
- MPlayer OS X — Originally a “Movie Player for Linux”, now available for Mac OS X as well as Windows. Like vlc it plays just about every format well, and also does some fancy filtering and scaling. This is the player I use most often for all non quicktime formats, because I like the UI better than the others, it seems to perform better, and the visual quality is very nice (video generally looks better from mplayer than from Windows Media Player — perhaps due to better filtering and scaling?)
June 30th, 2005 at 6:23 am
I highly recommend flip4mac’s solution. Of all the media players I’ve tryed (including all those you mentioned) quicktime player is the only decent one. Every other player (most egregiously Windows Media Player & RealPlayer) has to buffer files that are local, and stutters and barfs if you want to do something as simple as pause (and you can forget about jumping to a particular spot or live scrolling!). flip4mac’s solution has so far worked precisely as advertised. Well worth the small amount of change.
June 30th, 2005 at 8:27 am
I’ve tried Flip4Mac WMV Player with QuickTime Player and it’s works fine. Being a plug-in, it offers an added advantage — I can now catalog and view wmv files in iView MultiMedia Pro, the program I use to catalog photos (and now movies!).
May 28th, 2006 at 2:12 am
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