If you want to see the ugliest settings dialog ever invented by man, please by all means, try Cyberlink PowerDVD. Their program, including popup menus are riddled with advertisements informing you that you can “Activate” / “Upgrade” to a higher version. Even if you have the highest version and have activated it will still show all those fony ads to you. Their whole user interface is just plain ugly and the program feels like it was written in Visual Basic. I used it because in Windows XP I could install it and it their Cyberlink codec would work just fine and it would allow me to play my media files. With Windows Vista, this is not the case. When you install it, it is not able to play media files anymore. Maybe I had an older version, but I ditched it never the less. Windows Media Player is not the greatest either, but hey the interface looks more decent than CyberLink PowerDVD.

What I don’t understand is why so many companies can excel at making a functional product, but at the end of the day they package it in shit. Why would I want to buy it? If you haven’t already figured it out, the lust of the eyes run this world. If your package looks like shit you will have a hard time trying to sell it to people, especially people like me.

Anyways, like I said, Windows Media Player for Vista does a fine job and if you don’t like it there is always Media Player Classic. There are still a few things I wish Windows Media Player did though. For one, you cannot drag and drop MP4 files, or non standard file types, into the interface. You can only open them by double-clicking on them in Explorer or by using the open menu. Lame. Also, I wish it would repeat songs, but not repeat videos. I think most people agree that they are don’t usually watch the same video over and over, but that they do listen to the same song over and over.

To play all your video files with Windows Media Player on Vista you can download the Vista Codec Pack. I had great success with it. Most of the codec packs out there don’t work after you install them. This one works just fine and you don’t have to mess with it at all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Reviews, Troubleshoot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.