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View Full Version : WMP and Removing the Three Main Attack Vectors of Windows

DaveW
08-21-04, 08:13 AM
I would argue that the three most popular attack vectors (for worms and spyware etc) are:

Internet Explorer
Outlook
Windows Media Player

Most of us have taken I.E. out of the picture by switching to Firefox. Mozilla Thunderbird is also a good replacement for Outlook. I'll soon be switching my family over to that. But what about WMP? Although there are lots of alternative media players out there, I've yet to find one thats good enough all round to be a permanent replacement. Any suggestions?

If I could get rid of IE, Outlook and WMP and block RPC and DCOM ports on my firewall, I'd finally be back to a point that I haven't been at in nearly a decade: A computer so secure that I don't need anti-virus software. It would be kind of nice to get rid of Norton constantly sitting in memory and slowing down every file read operation.
Ninjaman09
08-23-04, 12:57 PM
Media Player Classic. Don't be fooled by the title, it's only superficially related to the old Windows Media Player. It plays every format you can think of, including .ogg video, and it's very fast with a nice simple interface. It also comes with a lot of codec support, so you won't need to hunt down a specific codec to play just one file. It's the only player I ever use. Grab it here (http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli). Just navigate down the page in the file list to find it.
saturnotaku
08-23-04, 01:12 PM
I've been looking for MPC as a standalone download. Thanks for tracking that down! :thumbsup:
mezkal
08-23-04, 01:24 PM
I much more a fan of Videolan Client. www.videolan.org Why? Well it does almost all of decoding and transcoding internally, supports VMR-9 (nice for dual screen users like me) and best of all, it's open source. Oh and it's a rather nifty regionless DVD Player (fully supports menus too - 100% DVD spec compliant) too.

:)
Ninjaman09
08-23-04, 02:30 PM
Heh, no problem saturnotaku, though I can't really say I looked that hard. And to mezkal - thanks for the tip! I'll be sure to check that out later. Doesn't MPC do most of what you mentioned though? I know it supports VMR9, at least.
Skrot
08-28-04, 01:03 PM
I guess winamp 5 doesn't do it for you? It's much better than windows media player, but then, I like good programs, and Microsoft gives me the ****s.
de><ta
08-28-04, 05:03 PM
I much more a fan of Videolan Client. www.videolan.org Why? Well it does almost all of decoding and transcoding internally, supports VMR-9 (nice for dual screen users like me) and best of all, it's open source. Oh and it's a rather nifty regionless DVD Player (fully supports menus too - 100% DVD spec compliant) too.

:)

/me votes for VLC too

However VLC does not play wmv files.

MPC + REAL ALTERNATIVE + QUICKTIME ALTERNATIVE = good choice too.
Skrot
08-28-04, 09:43 PM
Hm you could get mplayer. It's probably the best raw media player you can get, and it's open source and cross platform. I tried everything I could think of to play a VCD in windows on my gf's computer, and nothing worked. I knew that mplayer played them flawlessly, so I had a look to see if there was a windows version, and there was! Of course, it worked perfectly first time.
MUYA
08-28-04, 10:58 PM
cool....
eL_PuSHeR
08-29-04, 05:06 AM
/me votes for VLC too

However VLC does not play wmv files.

MPC + REAL ALTERNATIVE + QUICKTIME ALTERNATIVE = good choice too.

MPC + K-Lite Mega Codec Pack = Very good choice.

I also use MPC 6.4.8.2 - However everything plays fine except DVD movies which are quite jerky. Has anyone experienced this? Any solution? By the way, DVD movies plays just fine under WMP 9 (And both programs are using the same codecs I think).
myshkinbob
08-29-04, 07:12 PM
I can't believe nobody's mentioned BSplayer, it has to be the most configurable media player around, and there are plenty of good skins for it too. It's still surprises me even though i've been using it for over a year, the other day i wanted to play a 2cd divx movie with seperate subtitle files, and all i had to do was load the cd1 avi. It automatically knew to queue the cd2 avi after it, and even more impressive, it loaded the subtitles automatically for each cd, DESPITE the subtitles having different filenames to the avi's, it managed to work out from the title in the filename and the cdX in the filename that those subtitles were for the same film.

http://www.bsplay.com
eL_PuSHeR
08-30-04, 03:27 PM
Does Bsplayer play DVD movies? How? Opening directly the VIDEO_TS folder?
Nitz Walsh
08-30-04, 03:41 PM
I would argue that the three most popular attack vectors (for worms and spyware etc) are:

Internet Explorer
Outlook
Windows Media Player
Media Player to a far, far lesser extent - but the timing of this post is rather poor. SP2 plugs _many_ of the holes in Outlook Express and IE (well, the ones we know about!)- if you haven't, install it!.

That being said, Media PLayer Classic largely my player of choice, and I use Opera for browsing. Firefox is good as well though.
vampireuk
08-30-04, 05:08 PM
Media player classic is perhaps one of the best bits of software I have on this system. I tried using Thunderbird a while back but it kept screwing up for me so I'm using outlook with my virus scanner on all the time.