Better late than never, as they say, Adobe has leapt into the media-player field. After some months in beta, the recently released Adobe Media Player 1.0 will be going up against Microsoft's Windows Media Player and long-time industry standard RealNetworks' RealPlayer.
The main difference between the competing platforms comes down to content. Specifically, Adobe's first-generation offering does not offer support for playing music — a major failing in a "media" player.
In fact, Adobe Media Player 1.0 may at first strike one as being not much more than a glorified television set. Maybe Adobe has bigger plans for future iterations, but right now the cons outweigh the pros.
To its credit, Adobe Media Player runs across a variety of platforms, embracing Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, whereas Windows and RealNetworks operate only on Windows platforms.
Adobe also has given its best to set a high bar when it comes to ease of use. The interface is clean if somewhat blasé, using surprisingly few buttons to get a lot done, and with minimal clicking. The home page offers up a trim introduction, with buttons directing users to their own favorite TV shows, new episodes, personal videos culled from the user's computer, and the all-important catalog.
The catalog is where the content resides — "content" being a fairly substantial list of television shows broken down into 46 genres: Action, comedy, food, etc. Click a category and you'll get a rundown of available programs. The player remembers what categories you have picked in the past, a handy tool for retracing your steps.
Adobe has secured a wide selection of programs from a range of sources. Click a show to launch a download and in most cases you can watch the program as it downloads. A new Downloads menu arrives on the home page with icons indicating whether a program is downloading, paused or failed.
We're only four clicks in at this point and we already have our show: Catalog, genre, program, episode. Nifty.
There certainly is a strong usability factor here. Users can quickly and easily shift through scaling options, viewing their vids in full window/full screen or actual size. Basic controls such as play and pause are available through the keyboard.
For catching up on favorite shows, the Continuous Play feature will tap the New Episodes list and run straight through, launching the next episode as the one before ends, with no breaks in between, even in full screen mode.
Niftier still, the content here is free. That's a big change from Windows' and RealNetworks' players, which when it comes to content essentially function as online shopping malls. Each has ready links to a number of online stores hawking digital programming.
