Filed under: Software, Internet Tools
Adobe Media Player Beta now available
Adobe has released a beta of their Adobe Media Player. This media player is aimed at helping you consume, and find, online video. The app requires the AIR runtime on your Mac, though the install is painless.
Adobe is touting this as a lightweight, cross platform video player though if the performance on my MacBook (2 Ghz Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM) is any indication this player is pretty much dead on arrival. The transitions are choppy, the response time is laggy, and as such the application is useless on my Mac (your mileage may vary). Let's hope this gets cleared up before this app leaves beta, but until then I'll continue using Miro for my video blog consuming.
You can download a copy of the beta from Adobe Labs, and it is free.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Niklas B said 7:35AM on 10-01-2007
The interface is quite okay but it manages to strain my iMac CD 1.8 with 1.5GByte RAM with very few other applications open. Tag this one YAFAP (Yet ANother Failed Adobe Product).
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Chris24 said 8:16AM on 10-01-2007
The interface seems a little weird to me, its cool looking, it just doesn't seem to work well and intuitively. It also requires AIR, which could be a pain. It also requires a lot of RAM it seems, it slows down my computer which is 2GB RAM with almost nothing else open! So I must agree with Niklas, it is an YAFAP.
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Mo said 8:21AM on 10-01-2007
Adobe will no doubt end up rolling the AIR into Flash 10 to make it ubiquitous, so perhaps they should concentrate on making the Flash runtime itself actually usable on a Mac. I have Java apps that run more efficiently.
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Dave said 8:25AM on 10-01-2007
Scott, thanks for the Miro link!!! This app is awesome. It totally stole Adobe's thunder!
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Fernando said 8:25AM on 10-01-2007
abode abode abode
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Kichigai Mentat said 10:37AM on 10-01-2007
Oh my God, I hate AIR. I got introduced to it via Pownce, and it's such a pain. It's unstable, slow, and completely un-Mac-like. Cmd+W doesn't close the window, and if you do close the window, you're unable to retrieve it and the program just sits in the Dock until you force-quit it (that's right, without the window, a normal quit isn't possible). It doesn't chew up a huge amount of system resources, but everything else about it sucks.
Wake me when something better comes along (oh, wait, sorry, it has: Java. Say what you want about Java, but at least it's better than AIR!)
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kbv136 said 11:17AM on 10-01-2007
Miro - what a cool app. How come I have never heard of it on TUAW ? The Adobe video player is terrible, but Miro seem great.
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Brady J. Frey said 11:42AM on 10-01-2007
Mark Pilgrim has it right, just another failure of a self contained system - model arguably works for desktop, but always is a failure for the internet:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/05/02/silly-season
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choopes said 2:21PM on 10-01-2007
How about getting a Flash player that doesn't make my MacBook sound like a jet engine when I'm watching Youtube?
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Quine said 2:35PM on 10-01-2007
Almost everything Adobe makes nowadays is total crap. It's as if they only really care about their photoshop team (and maybe indesign) and half-ass everything else just because they can. Almost like Microsoft...
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Maynard Handley said 4:51PM on 10-02-2007
Why does the performance surprise you? This is the company that, with Flash now up to version 10 or whatever it is, is still unable to get even close to reasonable performance on video playback --- but is too damn dogmatic to admit their incompetence and route the video playback through QuickTime.
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