Adobe Media Player

Adobe Media Player software is a desktop video player capable of playing both online and offline content. The default Adobe Media Player catalog is provided by Adobe TV and consists of demos, training, and tips for Adobe products and services, as well as shows tailored for the Adobe community of designers, photographers, video professionals, and developers. Adobe Media Player can also be used to subscribe to video RSS feeds from third-party content providers, and it can play local content in formats such as FLV and F4V.

System requirements

Adobe Media Player software no longer contains third-party content in the default catalog. As part of Adobe’s initiative to focus on and streamline business priorities, the decision was made to refocus efforts away from content aggregation.

Moving forward, the Adobe Media Player catalog will be provided by Adobe TV, which includes demos, training, and tips for Adobe products and services, as well as shows tailored for the Adobe community of designers, photographers, video professionals, and developers. Users can also still subscribe to content from publishers who offer compatible video RSS feeds, and play local video files that are in compatible formats.

We understand that this shift in strategy affects both viewers and content publishers and have put together the following information to explain the options moving forward.

For viewers:

We want to sincerely thank you for being a valued customer and early adopter of Adobe Media Player. If you still want to watch shows and movies from former Adobe Media Player partners, you can continue to access your favorite content by visiting the publishers’ websites.

Still remember I had warned you beware of downloading movie from Internet illegally? Now we have good news. Adobe Systems has an Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free download for playing Flash-based Web videos on Macs or PCs. This means we can watch legal movies online now!

Why use Adobe Media Player?

AMP was build on Adobe’s AIR . AMP is capable for user to watch movie online and offline with feature of subscription to different video Webcasts such as CBS, PBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, CondeNet, and Scripps Networks. Eventually there will be more partners soon.

With Adobe AIR capability, you can stream the videos from content producer’s website directly or the videos can be downloaded to watch later. This means we can download these videos legally and it’s free!

How to use Adobe Media Player?

Goto AMP Download Center, click on “Install Now” button. Accept the term and start installation. You do not need to install Adobe AIR separately. The installer will also setup Adobe AIR for you automatically.

It’s simple and fast. Took me 10 minutes to finish the installation.

Adobe media player 1.7 is a cross-platform desktop media player particularly intended to play streamed or downloaded media content when you are on- or off-line. This application provides an interesting way to watch videos online. If you choose to download your videos, this application would do it automatically even if you are offline.
It offers varied features for navigating, organizing, and subscribing to video content. You can organize a list of favorites, add ratings to flash videos, manage your personal video library by filtering favorites and library based on keywords and tags. By subscribing to your favorite shows, this application will automatically download them for you when new episodes are available.
For media content creators, advertisers and delivery partners, Adobe media player helps build and define branding and advertising in and around their content. Content publishers can track and increase viewership by offering new content via RSS feeds. Adobe media player tracks the usage and ensures protection of the content.

Advantages:

• Quick Catalog search.
• Continuous play.
• Content status indicator.
• Automatically download latest episodes of your favorite TV shows.
• Flexibility to view, whether you are online or offline.

Disadvantages:

• Shows are available only for USA

Adobe Media Player, a desktop media player that lets you play Flash Videos (flv), podcasts and QuickTime movies, just got better.

Adobe today posted a new build of Adobe Media Player on Adobe Labs – the UI is more or less the same but Adobe Media player can now play videos that are encoded using H.264 codec.

You would need Adobe AIR to install Adobe Media Player. And though you can watch videos that are already saved on your desktop, the current build of AMP won’t let you add new RSS feeds.

Updated: For subscribing to your favorite video podcasts inside Adobe Media Player, go to “My Favorites” and click the “Add RSS Feed” link at the bottom.

Leveraging Adobe Interactive Runtime (AIR), Adobe Media Player is a cross-platform compatible media delivery option for user who want to watch video online and, in some cases, download them. Here’s a look at what to expect.

Installing Adobe Media Player (AMP) is a painless affair, if you’ve ever run an AIR application. Adobe relies on its own installation technology to manage AMP’s installation, which requires you to give it permission to load up. Once that’s done you’ll be looking at the main AMP interface, which is a stylish black. The application resides in your Applications folder along with everything else.

Like all AIR applications, AMP leverages Adobe’s Flash technology in order to work. The software also supports Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, and can restrict you to just watching videos as opposed to downloading them and viewing them offline — the content provider has control over that, at a legend of icons lets you know what you can do with the content you’re viewing.

That means that at least in the case of content whose provider wants it so, you’re able — for the first time, I should add — to download video outside the browser in the Flash format. Adobe said the content can scale from 480i up to 1080p, so HDTV fans will be able to get their fill of high definition material.

So far, Adobe has signed up major broadcasters and content publishers to provide video material for AMP users. CBS has jumped into the fray with its CSI shows and a bevy of archive material for example, while MTV Networks is offering The Hills. PBS has some good stuff available for viewing, along with Universal Music Group and others. Adobe said that more content is coming soon from Comedy Central, Spike and other broadcasters in the coming months.

You can mark content that’s of specific interest for you. I found some anime that I wanted to watch, along with archives of classic Twilight Zone episodes, so I marked them both. Favorites appear when you first fire up AMP.

While the emphasis here is on free content, there ain’t no such this as a free lunch, as the saying goes. Adobe is working with content owners and publishers to generate advertising opportunities and targeted marketing campaigns based around AMP. The software itself measures content usage, and Adobe provides options such as “protected” streaming, DRM and advertising protection (to keep users from arbitrarily blocking ads).

And for what it’s worth, AMP also lets you keep track of “personal videos” you’ve created yourself. If you have video content on your own machine you’d like to manage using AMP, that option is open to you.

My experience with a pre-release version of AMP was that it works, although the actual quality of video, even after manipulating the software’s options, left a little to be desired. You can either watch a small streaming view or scale it upward to fill the window or even your entire screen.

The software offers intuitive navigation that lets you explore to find the content you want. Its archive of video from the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) event, for example, offered detailed synopses of each segment as well as an overview of what the event was about. It was pretty simple to understand how to find what I wanted to watch.

You can “drill down” by recently added content, view by network, click on genre buttons to help explore particular types of video you’d like to watch. The catalog window also lets you search using words or phrases.

All told, AMP is an interesting way for Adobe to leverage Flash video away from its “traditional” place on Web pages. The technology works reasonably well on the Mac. For now, there’s a relative paucity of compelling content, and nothing unique to AIR to make it a “must have” product. If Adobe’s able to convince content providers that this is the way to share their material with the public, then AMP could be an important player in the burgeoning digital video delivery market. And the fact that it’s cross-platform compatible is a boon for Mac users, who won’t be left out of the mix.

Adobe Media Player not only rivals Apple’s Quicktime and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, but also provides on-demand video content such as episodes of ‘CSI: Miami’ and ‘CSI: New York’, along with other feature programming and music videos.

Based on Adobe’s Flash technology, Adobe Media Player contains both content creation and playback components, and is available for Windows and Mac.

The overall look and design is sleek, uncluttered and easy to use. As soon as you load Adobe Media Player the black interface features bright, bold images of the TV shows available.

The Adobe Media Player home screen is split into two sections. The lefthand side covers your video preferences, including favourite shows and any files imported from your PC’s hard drive, while the righthand side provides access to the content currently available direct from Adobe.

To date, Adobe Media Player content is aimed at the US market, and we were able to pick from 384 TV shows from a number of American networks including MTV and CBS. Everything from comedy and animation to documentaries and music-related shows are available. Although no UK content is available, some programmes will be familiar to a UK audience, including MTV’s ‘Cribs’ and ‘The Hills’ (semi-reality TV show about rich kids in LA), ‘CSI New York’ and the ‘Rosie O’Donnell’ chat show.

Currently, episodes can only be streamed online, although Adobe is planning to launch a subscription service allowing programmes to downloaded and viewed offline. Further details of this service have yet to be announced.

Once you’ve chosen a programme, you are able to stream it in the Adobe Media Player either at actual size, fit-to-size or full screen, although in the later two options video-quality suffers. Adobe Media Player also offers stop, pause, fast forward and rewind options.

Adobe introduced a new application for viewing media on the desktop this morning at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas. The application is called Adobe Media Player, which the company says builds upon the base of Adobe’s Flash Player to help expand Adobe’s video solutions online. Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, whose company is partnering with Adobe on the venture, described Adobe Media Player as “a technology portfolio that will drive new advances in Internet video authoring, playback and commerce.”

Unlike the current Flash Player, Adobe Media Player will enable content providers to monetize their media and provide new ways to distribute it. The application even offers options to protect their media through the use of “streaming encryption, content integrity protection, and identity-based protection.” There will also be built-in options to provide analytics data on users so that content providers can have a better understanding of their audiences.

From the user perspective, Adobe claims that Media Player will offer higher-quality Flash playback than previously available. The application will also have the ability to play videos offline, “ways to discover interesting new shows,” fullscreen capabilities, viewer ratings, and a Favorites feature that can automatically download new episodes of a show or podcast series.

It appears as if Adobe is getting serious about offering a richer video consumption experience on the desktop now that videos embedded in Flash format are widely available on the Internet. Flash Player has always provided the ability to watch .flv and .swf files and will probably continue to be the default option for testing within Flash itself, but offers an extremely limited user experience for actual media consumption. Adobe’s new Media Player sounds like a much more robust application with the user experience and distribution options in mind, and that the company hopes will compete with the likes of Apple’s QuickTime or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.

Adobe Media Player will be a cross-platform application, according to the company, and will be available as a free beta “later” in 2007 through Adobe’s website. The full version is expected to be available toward the end of the year through Adobe and its technology partners.

Adobe announced this morning the immediate availability of its new Media Player in conjunction with the launch of Adobe TV, “a free online video resource for expert instruction and inspiration about Adobe products.” Adobe Media Player 1.0 is an AIR-based application, making it a cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. With Adobe Media Player, Adobe hopes to offer people a more user-friendly way to interact with Flash content on the desktop and to offer publishers a way to reach a new audience and monetize their media.

Adobe Media Player was first announced a year ago at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show. Like Apple’s Final Cut Server (also announced at NAB and finally released this week), Adobe promised that the software would be available later in 2007, but apparently experienced delays that pushed its launch into 2008. Although Adobe hasn’t stated why Media Player got pushed, the company may have waited until it got a handful of content partners for the launch.

Adobe claims that Media Player will let users watch their own content stored on their desktops, like QuickTime or Windows Media Player. However, Adobe Media Player is quite limited in the types of media it can actually play—downloaded FLV files (encoded with Spark or VP6) or MPEG-4 (encoded with H.264), and that’s it. This information isn’t easily discoverable within the app (I found it on the FAQ page), and even worse, the Media Player itself will still let you import movies that do not fall under these specific file formats and codecs. Once you import them, however, it merely tells you that there’s a problem playing the files without explaining any further. This is pretty user-unfriendly, as it leads the slightly less knowledgeable user into thinking that his or her files might be compatible when they aren’t.

Needless to say, we’re a little disappointed with Adobe Media Player’s attempt at playing… well, our own media. This may change in coming updates to the software, of course, but it doesn’t look like Adobe Media Player will be our one-stop shop for media playback anytime soon.

Thankfully, the player does have other merits. In addition to being able to play back videos from the desktop, Adobe Media Player also serves as a media streaming service, complete with “channels” with different content. For comparison, Adobe’s offering is a bit more like Miro, the open source media player that also offers numerous channels of free content from various providers. A number of networks have made their content available through Adobe Media Player, such as Blip.tv, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Food Network, and MTV. The content (in general) is largely made up of short clips, although full episodes can be found scattered about—for example, I was able to find full, ad-supported episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series through a CBS channel.

Of course, there are downsides here as well. The content selection is limited, although if Adobe Media Player becomes more popular, that could easily change. Video quality varies between content providers as well—video resolutions are all over the map depending on which network and which show you’re watching. There also appears to be no way to share what you’re watching with someone else, even if that means the other person also has to have Adobe Media Player installed in order to watch your link (this is something you can do in Miro, and also in Joost). If you find something interesting, you’re limited to telling your friends about it some other way.

Performance was decent—we watched several streams with no hiccups, and even a few in fullscreen mode. You can also subscribe to certain channels if you want to be alerted when a new clip or episode is posted, which is helpful (and also a feature in competing apps).

At the moment, I wouldn’t turn first to Adobe Media Player when I want to watch media online. Content selection is limited (although I am fond of the clips from the Food Network), and its capabilities as a media player are even more limited. Adobe Media Player has some potential to at least be on par with other, similar services, but does it want to just be the same as others? Adobe may have to work a little harder if it wants to stand out.

Adobe Systems released Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free download for playing Flash-based Web videos on Macs or PCs. (Get it from Download.com for Windows or Mac.)

Written with Adobe’s AIR, AMP is a hybrid online/offline application that lets people subscribe to different video Webcasts. Adobe has signed on some initial partners including CBS, PBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, CondeNet, and Scripps Networks. (See my colleague Rafe Needleman’s review of AMP on Webware.)

The videos are either streamed from the content producer’s Web site or they can be downloaded. Adobe will host a catalog on its site where people can find videos, including one on Adobe-related content called Adobe TV. Because it’s written with AIR, people can be offline or online when they watch.

Initially, many of the videos available will have advertising attached to them. Using Adobe’s digital rights management server, content producers are able to put controls on their media.

Later, Adobe intends to enhance the client software so that different business models can be used, such as paying to download a video or renting videos, said Ashley Still, a senior product manager at Adobe.

There are already a number of existing media players, like iTunes. But Adobe thinks that having its own player will be strategic for a number of reasons, Still said.

PBS is one of the content partners to use the Adobe Media Player.
(Credit: Adobe)

Adobe is trying to garner more revenue from online services; the company will be sharing revenue from advertising with content producers.

The player complements Adobe’s multimedia content-creation multimedia products and Adobe wants to make sure there is a high-quality way to deliver that video to consumers, Still said.

“This is the first time Adobe is participating directly in the playback of Internet video content,” she said.

With the 1.0 version, the player will only display Flash content, but Adobe could add support for other formats, Still said.