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[Lippy]

Why does Windows Media player consume 15% CPU when only playing music? Why does it not even support the AVI format out of the box? Sadly, the only contenders to this are Winamp, RealPlayer and iTunes, all of which smell a bit funky. Well OK, I missed one. There is VLC Player as well.

It is free and open source, and supports many codecs from the get go. It is also lightweight and even comes in a portable edition to prove it. Thankfully, there is a way out of having those media players that attempt to take over your computer. VLC Player fills in the gaps where the other media players fail so hard, and those gaps are the size of the Grand Canyon. Did I mention it's also cross platform too?

VLC Player

[Nite*Star]

Ooooh I just wrote about this in the Internet section. Yes I second Lippy's recommendation here. I highly recommend VLC Media Player for everyone to use.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/