Thursday, September 14, 2006

Tech Saturday a Little Early: Media Player Classic (NOT MS)

I'm going to be gone for the next few days. Back to the east to celebrate my grandmother's 99th birthday. I should be back in time for a Sunday Pickle, though.

In the meantime, I recently came across a completely portable little player that works as a great substitute for the bloated RealPlayer "required" to watch Indiana appellate oral arguments: Media Player Classic. It's a single executable file, no installation required, and it doesn't write home to mother. Just pop it into Program Files or wherever and run it. (I have it on my USB stick.) You can download it here at SourceForge. The file is about 5 megabytes.

To watch the oral arguments--or anything else--simply drag the link to the argument onto the player's screen. It will open in a trice. (Another little Windows trick I picked up recently was how to drag links to applications: just drag anything to the target application location on the taskbar and in a second the application will pop up on the screen permitting you to then dump the link into it. No messing or fussing with trying to keep a screen on top or visible. Maybe the world has always known about this trick, but it was amazing news to me.)

MediaPlayer Classic also has a primitive, but effective favorites list--and when saving a favorite, such as an oral argument, you can also save to a particular place so that the broadcast will open to that spot.

The SourceForge blurb says that RealPlayer has to be installed for Media Player Classic to be able to play RealPlayer files. I haven't uninstalled RealPlayer yet, so I don't know about that.

Here's the link to the page with the most recent Indiana oral arguments with active links. Pick an argument and try it out.

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