Playing Windows Media on a Mac

Many news web sites today offer video news clips. Most of them seem to support only the Windows Media format, leaving most Mac users unable to playback the video.

While Microsoft canceled the Mac player for Windows Media, they do offer a 3rd party utility that enables you to playback many, but not all, Windows Media video clips on popular news sites.

Flip4Mac, available for free from the Microsoft site, makes it possible for you to access CNNs video stream. However, Flip4Mac does not work with MSNBC.

Note: the latest version of Flip4Mac, v.2.1, recently stopped working with BBC videos; hopefully this is just a bug that can be fixed quickly.

Short of running Windows XP on Parallels, there is not much else you can do to access these video stream until they provide native support for Mac or become compatible with the Flip4Mac plugin.

For now, I am glad to be able to access CNN's video through the free Flip4Mac plugin.

I hope that in the near future, top news organization, will adopt a more open and cross platform video streaming technology to enable non Windows users to access their content.

Cristiano Pierry

Comments

[Antonio]

I just watched a few BBC video clips ala Flip4Mac and they streamed perfectly, however, msnbc is on my nasty list...they've got specific wmv requirements for content viewing. Kind of irritating when a company restricts access like that. Telestream will try to get it working with their next update, provided msnbc doesn't alter anything before that.

[Cris]

I just tried all of the video links on BBC news home page and they all fail :-(