Noow is a pretty new competitor to the media playback game. Its claim is that it can play back HD video with amazing quality. Lets see how it stacks up against VLC.
The desktop applications
Both are applications you will need to download and install onto your machine. The look of Noow is clean and modern.
There are options in the left sidebar to video sources like Hulu and YouTube. Also near the bottom of that same sidebar, there are some links to podcasts.
VLC has a more plain interface. It is not as stylish as Noow’s player, but has everything you typically access right there in the open.
Noow media types played
Noow can play MPEG, AVI, DivX, H.264, Flash Video, QuickTime, Windows Media. There is not a full list of file types anywhere I could see. While installing Noow, you may want choose custom install so you can turn on support for QuickTime, MP3, AVI, MPEG, Windows media files. These are not checked by default.
VLC media types played
VLC has a full list of media types it can play. If you take a look at the file types, I doubt there are many out there that VLC won’t play.
Having the ability to play a specific media type can take a lot of the guess work out of deciding on the player you want to use.
Noow special features
Playback location – If you need to stop a movie or video before you finish it, Noow will remember the location where you stopped and automatically start you there when you open the file again. RSS feeds – Get the latest video from your favorite site using the RSS feed option. Torrent files – You can use files from Bit Torrent Space – You can set aside a certain space on your hard drive for your downloads and be notified when it is full.
VLC special features
Stream – You can stream your audio and video files to other devices. This can be super cool if you set up an old computer as a media server. Remote – Your Android device can be used as a remote to control your media playback. Appearance – You can download different skins to change the look of the player window.
Conclusion
I am still leaning toward VLC. My reasoning is, I am using Windows 8 for most things recently and Noow was a bit choppy playing video. I don’t expect all of the applications to work perfectly on a new OS. Noow worked great for me in XP. VLC has been a great all around media player for as long as it has been around. They usually adapt to new formats very quickly. What kinds of features help you choose which media player to use?
