Perhaps it should read "more vulns"?

Aside from that, Media Player Classic isn't made by M$. It's made by Gabest.

If people can't trust their media player, they can always run a Java one. Safe, reliable, upgradeable.

"Taking care not to click on suspicious links in browsers and email programs should suffice"

If we could trust the general population to do this then we wouldn't have viruses, exploits and other malware running around the world like wildfire. WE (as reg readers) are neither the kind to get exploited by this and nor are we the kind to whom the advice is directed. But you have to remember, a lot of people are stupid and, even more importantly, a lot of seemingly intelligent people become stupid in the face of technology. They elevate someone to the role of 'knows computers' just because they know where the on switch is and if they can manage to order something from Amazon or find the lyrics to an old song on Google then they become revered as IT Gods.

SYS 49152 eh? Ahhh.. the good old days of the Commodore 64....

Actually, if you don't want all your resources eaten by the various functions and eye candy included in the newer versions, 6.4 is a good little player.

It's also included as part of XP, under Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe

If you know and trust the source of all your videos, and don't run IE or have it plugged in to firefox, it's even safe :-P

Presumably, using it with ffdshow to display divx/xvid, it wouldn't matter about IE or playing untrusted videos, as ffdshow uses it's own libs instead of seperate codecs. I could be wrong though.

Sounds like it's been specifically crafted for those dodgy people that download dodgy vids off the net. The Media Players concerned are all packaged in the ACE Mega Codecs Pack which contains pretty much every popular codec going.

> If we could trust the general population to do this [not clicking on "suspicious" links] then we wouldn't have viruses, exploits and other malware running around the world like wildfire.

Surely the point is that if the software was properly written - even just *slightly better* written - then it wouldn't matter WHAT people clicked on. Even "suspicious" links. (whatever *they* are - do you have some way of spotting them in advance?)

Once you get to full frame rate video with plenty of CPU power to spare, it doesn't matter much how much resources a media player takes.

A Ferrari on a motorway goes pretty much the same speed as a mini. What matters is that it arrives without breaking down - or perhaps a better analogy in the case of a virus is to arrive without the road ahead being destroyed. Reliability and security come with Java.

I admit writing codecs in ARM machine code was quite fun, particularly when it came to bit twiddling, but codecs these days don't need that much bit twiddling. With a modern JIT, Java isn't that different in performance to C++ - with similar bitwise operators too.

I'd be very intrigued by a Cobol media player - though it wouldn't be much use as my browser can't run Cobol! But it can run my Java media player, as can almost every browser on the planet. And without buffer overflows.