QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was available for download on Windows until 2016. QuickTime was created in 1991, when the concept of playing digital video directly on computers was "groundbreaking.
Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that Microsoft developed to play audio and video on personal computers. It has been a component of the Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows 9x, Windows NT, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile. Microsoft also released editions of Windows Media Player for classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Solaris, but has since discontinued them.
RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous s of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, , Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released. The program is powered by an underlying open-source media engine called Helix.
Media player software is a type of application software for playing multimedia s like audio and video files. Media players commonly display standard media control icons known from physical devices such as tape recorders and CD players, such as play ( ), pause ( ), fastforward (⏩️), rewind (⏪), and stop ( ) buttons. In addition, they generally have progress bars (or "playback bars"), which are sliders to locate the current position in the duration of the media file. Mainstream operating systems have at least one default media player.
VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client and commonly known as simply VLC) is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store. VLC supports many audio- and video-compression-methods and s, including DVD-Video, Video CD, and streaming-protocols.