The Woodwork

After I read that Microsoft quietly discontinued support for Windows Media on Mac OS X, I didn’t know what to make of it. Just another free app for the Mac that Microsoft is discontinuing—guess MSN Messenger is next on the chopping block.

As a consunmer, it reminded me that I needed to install a Windows Media Player solution on my computer again, as it begins its arduous recovery from a drive failure. At work, many people zip around video and given the platform predelictions here, many times that video is something in Windows Media. Well, I guess that leaves out Windows Media Player X 9.0.

Now normally I would download the latest MPlayer or VideoLAN Client to do this, but that always seemed a kludge. Oh, they have their uses, but I mostly I’m talking about a one-trick WMV playback-pony. Luckily, the article pointed out a solution I had bookmarked and forgotten about: Flip4Mac WMV.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the $10 shareware fee is only for importing, saving, and encoding. It’s free for playback within Quicktime and as a internet plugin. Score!

Time to test it out on the latest viral WMV video: a small segment from Sci Fi Channel’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not about a young pool playing prodigy, “Landon the Shark Rules.”

As you can see below, I “believe” it worked like a champ:

Fringe benefit

Another fringe benefit of this is that I noticed I no longer have to use ffmpegX to translate the movies generated by Caitlin’s Casio EX-Z750 so that they can be viewed in QuickTime. Try it yourself!

(Even though nominally Casio and Pentax are using MPEG-4 for movies, it is for the video codec only, and a Microsoft bastardization at that. The audio is Microsoft’s version of the ancient IMA codec and the interleaving is done in AVI. Ick!)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Macintosh, business and economics, photography. 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.