SillyDog701

[Antony]

Popwire WMV-9 Component 2.0

January this year, we reported Microsoft to distribute free [sdt=10623]WMV Component (by Flip4Mac)[/sdt], a component for QuickTime player to play Windows Media movies ([tt].wmv[/tt]). However, the Flip4Mac's WMV Component does not work on Intel-based Macs yet. The good news is, Popwire WMV-9 Component 2.0 has just released few days ago, and it is a Universal Application, it allows you to work on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers under Mac OS X. (Thanks to SillyDog701 Member Pu7o for informing me about this application.)

Popwire WMV-9 Component 2 is free for viewing and importing Windows Media content without any limitations. Exporting content required a license fee of US$ 49.

WMV-9 Component 2.0 also works for QuickTime based applications such as Final Cut Pro, iMovies.

If you have an Intel-based Mac, and would like to watch WMV movies under OS X, you might want to give WMV-9 Component 2.0 a try, and tell us how well it works.

System requirement:
G4 or higher or any Intel based Mac.
Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher for PowerPC (with QuickTime Pro 6.5.2 or later)
Mac OS X 10.4.5 or higher for Intel (with QuickTime Pro 7 or later)
Minimum 256 MB RAM

link: Popwire WMV-9 Component (Official homepage)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.2

[Pu7o]

From my experience, Popwire WMV-9 Component 2.0 does not support WMV 7 movies, only WMV 9 movies.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.2

[Antony]

Feedback from a The Daily Mac reader,

Popwire has been a dud for me. There’s a significant difference between it and Flip4Mac. IMHO, Flip4Mac is far superior. Popwire only supports WM9 and does nothing for web streaming. Creating an Intel version is very intense for F4M programmers, so it’s gonna take a little more time for them to get it all done and tested. As you see below, it covers a lot of ground and thus needs a lot of QA to make sure it’s gonne be stable. I don’t think it will be too long before we see the UB version. Even Apple and Adobe don’t have all their apps converted yet.

Here’s an info bit found at: http://flip4mac.blogspot.com/

Flip4Mac’s supports WM7, 8, 9, 9 Advanced, ISO MPEG 4 V1.0 & V1.1, Microsoft MPEG 4 V2 & V2 along with multiple audio codecs. And not only that, but it’s a web plugin for AV playback. Considering all the streaming formats out there, that bit is quite complex.

Of course you can pay less than PW charges for import ($29) and export ($49)features, but again, IMHO, the freebie is impressive. Frankly, I don’t know how they can give it away.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.2

[Don_HH2K]

The lack of backwards compatibility seems to be the major setback of this software, but judging by their site, I've noticed something else as well:they apparently don't support some other WMV9 codecs either, such as WMV9 Advanced Profile, WMV9 Screen, WMA9 Professional, WMA9 Voice, and let's not forget that it won't play back MPEG-4 video inside a Windows Media stream.

7- and 8-series codecs are still in use in quite a few places, and MPEG-4 has been an officially supported codec since 7-Series rolled out.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02

[Pu7o]

Another way of watching WMV movies on Mac OS X is using VideoLAN (also known as VLC). VLC supports Windows Media Video 7 and 8 (but not 9).

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060310 Camino/1.0.0+ (Pu7o)