[Vorbis] Vorbis Players for Windows

[Daniel Schregenberger]

On Don, 2005-01-20 at 11:00 +1100, Michael Smith wrote:
> > I've recently put a few of my tracks online (http://livenraw.npfdd.ch/
> > for those interested; it's a solo-rock-performance by me) and of course
> > I've used Vorbis for this.
> > Now I had several reports on the topic "How do I play these ogg-things
> > on Windows?". I've linked to http://www.vorbis.com/ but apparently this
> > is not easy enough.
> > One of my friends even told me he tried a couple of players from the
> > Software page but had no success. Not with media-player or Winamp2. And
> > he's definately more into computers than the average user.
> > 
> > No my question is: isn't there a simpler way to explain these people how
> > to get Vorbis running on their computer?
> > What page do you refer them to?
> 
> The Wiki page for software players is probably the best/easiest place
> to give them a wide selection (though for my part, I typically point
> users directly to specific players, such as winamp).

Ah, well. That explains a lot.
I tend to forget about the wiki. It's not very good linked from the
vorbis.com page.
Why don't you replace the outdated software-download pages (at least the
3rd party ones) by the Wiki, which seems to be much more up to date?

> > The important part here is "simple". The best would probably be a very
> > easy integration into MS media-player, but I've been reported trouble
> > with the DS-Filters and they seem pretty outdated to me too.
> 
> Which DS filters have you tried? The only ones we'd recommend
> (http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/) have a release only just over a
> month old - hardly 'outdated'. These should work very well and
> reliably - if you have any problems with them, please let us know.

I looked at http://tobias.everwicked.com/oggds.htm which was last
updated somewhere in 2002 and is linked from the vorbis page and also is
the first hit in google. (Probably because it is linked and not the
illiminable page :)

> For users that like the MS media player (I don't claim to understand
> why, but some people apparently do! :-), this is probably the
> simplest/easiest solution.

Well. It's builtin. "Normal" people buy a computer and don't do much but
install new Versions of MS Office etc. every now and then. If at all.

> I guess the only thing we could do to make it simpler for users would
> be to provide an exe download (currently, they're zip files containing
> a setup.exe and a couple of other files. Since many versions of
> windows don't come with zip software, this doesn't seem ideal for
> ultimate-user-friendliness).

That is probably a good idea. Making vorbis.com a little simpler and
integrating the wiki better would IMHO be more important tough.

-- Daniel


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