Our best media player article has been fully updated for 2011.
Some media players are bloated monsters, packed with unnecessary features. You've seen the results: open an HD video and they'll keep you waiting while your hard drive thrashes, your RAM is gobbled up and your CPU utilisation reaches new highs.
You don't have to put up with this, though. Other media players launch in a flash, and then make minimal demands on your system resources, allowing smooth HD video playback even on the most underpowered of PC hardware.
There's a problem, of course - you have to figure out which players fall into each category. And that's not easy, because everyone claims their own products are fast, efficient and great performers, whether they are, or they're really not.
The answer was obvious, then. We had to benchmark the players ourselves. So we took 16 of the top contenders from around the web, measured the time it took them to load and begin playing (largely) HD videos in 6 common formats (MP4-based AVI, H264 MOV, MPEG-2, MP4, OGG and FLV), and monitored their average CPU utilisation and RAM requirements.
And it turned out there were major differences in launch time and resource use between some of the programs – so let's find out which is the best media player for 2012.
Some media players are bloated monsters, packed with unnecessary features. You've seen the results: open an HD video and they'll keep you waiting while your hard drive thrashes, your RAM is gobbled up and your CPU utilisation reaches new highs.
You don't have to put up with this, though. Other media players launch in a flash, and then make minimal demands on your system resources, allowing smooth HD video playback even on the most underpowered of PC hardware.
There's a problem, of course - you have to figure out which players fall into each category. And that's not easy, because everyone claims their own products are fast, efficient and great performers, whether they are, or they're really not.
The answer was obvious, then. We had to benchmark the players ourselves. So we took 16 of the top contenders from around the web, measured the time it took them to load and begin playing (largely) HD videos in 6 common formats (MP4-based AVI, H264 MOV, MPEG-2, MP4, OGG and FLV), and monitored their average CPU utilisation and RAM requirements.
And it turned out there were major differences in launch time and resource use between some of the programs – so let's find out which is the best media player for 2012.
0 comments:
Post a Comment