For those of you looking to play Windows Media on the Mac and absolutely loathe Windows Media Player, check out Flip4Mac’s WMV Player component for the Mac. For US$10, you can play Windows Media files in QuickTime player. (Though see the note about open-source players below; their support for Windows Media may be good enough for your purposes.) I bought it, and I’ve been quite happy with it. It will even use the QuickTime plugin instead of the dreaded Windows Media plugin to handle playback of Windows Media on the Web, even when they’re served those clunky .asx files.

Note: Several open-source multimedia players, such as VLC, XinePlayer and mplayerosx, will play .wmv files, but some WMV files have an advanced codec that these players don’t support yet, so they unfortunately won’t play all .wmv files. While I’m fairly certain that the codec will be reverse-engineered in time, for me, $10 is a pretty good deal to make sure I don’t have to deal with the pain of Windows Media Player ever again. (Of course, the arguably better solution is to use non-proprietary media file formats such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora!)