What do you use to play your movies on your windows pc? I personally use Bsplayer and VLC, but now I would like to have some sort of HTPC and I discovered XBMC and mediaportal which seam to be both quite good (mediaportal can also natively use tv-cards to record tv). What do you use?
I just use the WMP that comes with Windows 7, no problem! Although sometimes I do delve into VLC if required...
I have noticed that VLC is used more as a "backup" (if the normally used program can't cope with a particular file/codec) rather then the primary method to view videos.
Media Player Classic Homecinema does the job for me, very easy to configure to behave EXACTLY the way you want it to.
Media Player Classic Home Cinema & CoreAVC. Beats FFDshow by miles for decoding x264. I used this guide: http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/watching-h264-videos-using-compute-unified-device-architecture-cuda/
K-lite codec pack, which includes all codecs and Media Player Classic Home Cinema. MPC opens all files no problem, don't need any form of backup what so ever.
+1 to the above post, I only use VLC because it comes with it's own codecs and everything I've wanted to play I've thrown at VLC and it hasn't batted an eyelid it plays everything! Great stuff. Strange thing is sometimes with Windows Media Player on certain WMV files it doesn't play them with sound, even though the codecs are there, but as soon as I open the same file/files with VLC it plays with sound..... very odd.
I use WMP for DVDs etc, and VLC for everything else apart from WMV files, which VLC doesn't seem to like, they usually go all pixely and wrong colours.
MplayerC-HomeCinema... Simple, clean, low-power. Has enough options to be useful, and it has an option to shut down/sleep/standby etc when finishing a playlist; great for watching stuff at night in bed.
