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Technology Lab / Information Technology

Adobe shoots an AIR ball with new Media Player

Adobe has released a 1. open.

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, 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.

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