Friday, July 28, 2006

Flip4Mac Gets Intel Upgrade

With Microsoft dropping further development of Windows Media Player for Macintosh, they partnered with 3rd party developer Flip4Mac to provide continuing support for the WMV format on Macintosh and for free.

Flip4Mac

However, at the time of the initial release of the free player, it wasn't compatible with the Intel based Macintosh models, which probably made the PC community titter a bit and almost certainly annoyed anyone that had just bought a new Mac.

Anyway, Flip4Mac announced that they were working on an Intel compatible version and now it's here at last and it can be downloaded from either Flip4Mac or Microsoft.

The free player allows you to play Windows Media in QuickTime Player, Safari and other Web browsers. In fact, you can play Windows Media in almost any application that supports QuickTime including Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint. If you need the ability to import or convert Windows Media video or audio, then you'll have to upgrade to the Pro version (for a wee consideration of course).

Supported Audio Codecs
  • Windows Media Audio 9 Professional
  • Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless
  • Windows Media Audio 9 Standard
  • Windows Media Audio
  • ISO MPEG Layer 3
  • Microsoft G.726
  • Microsoft IMA ADPCM
  • Microsoft G.711 aLaw
  • Microsoft G.711 uLaw
  • Microsoft ADPCM
Supported Video Codecs
  • Windows Media Video 9 Standard (WMV3)
  • Windows Media Video 8 (WMV2)
  • Windows Media Video 7 (WMV1)
  • ISO MPEG-4 V1.1 (M4S2)
  • ISO MPEG-4 V1.0 (MP4S)
  • Microsoft MPEG-4 V3 (MP43)
  • Microsoft MPEG-4 V2 (MP42)
  • Microsoft Motion JPEG (MJPG)
Supported File Formats
  • Advanced Systems Format (ASF)
  • Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX)
  • Audio/Video Interleaved (AVI)
Supported Network Protocols
  • MMS-RTSP
  • MMS-HTTP
  • HTTP
  • FTP

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are mistaken. The Flip4Mac web page:
http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_tech.htm
explicitly unchecks the "play wmva" box.

Allan Ogg said...

You're right of course. I must've been seeing too many ticks and missed the fact that one was unchecked. I've updated the post so thanks for spotting that Jon.