Template talk:Media player software

Trim entries
This template has sections that are long and difficult to manage. It lists everything that exists, which makes it overlap with the respective categories. Templates and categories shouldn't overlap. This template should highlight important media players for easy navigation instead of being a dumping ground for everything that exists. Determining importance would probably lead to some bickering, but a big first step would be to remove players that are obsolete. Miami33139 (talk) 21:09, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I understand your concern; however, deleting any media player from the list or giving it higher priority means infernal non-ending bombardment criticism until someone comes and revert the edit. All of these media players have claim of notability.


 * However, I have just deleted a truckload of irrelevant links. I hope that satisfied you. Fleet Command (talk) 12:30, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * I hope it is less of junkyard now. Fleet Command (talk) 12:47, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Discontinued/Vulnerable Freeware
QuickTime for Windows has (according to it's page) had two, exploited in the wild security vulnerabilities since it's discontinuation thus is dangerous to use (e.g. you can get a virus or have your bank info stolen by installing and using this). The template has no mechanic for designating discontinued freeware, and I think that listing this together with things that are not dangerous could be misleading in a dangerous way, and I feel compelled to fix this. Wikipedia Policy is against deletions so I'm not sure where to go from here. Concussious (talk) 22:50, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Media players vs media servers
I just removed Emby from this template. As far as I understand, a media player does the work of decoding a media file into video/audio output on the device it runs on. As far as I know, Emby cannot do this at all, it is a media server. At best, it has a web frontend which can serve media to your web browser (in which case the web browser is the media player) or to an "app" which is just a thin wrapper around a system-provided audio/video decoder (in which case the device itself is the media player).

I think it's important to make this distinction, otherwise Apache and nginx would be "media players" rather than web servers, as they too can serve files to media players. But what do others think? Is this a fair criterion? 141.143.213.52 (talk) 12:58, 16 November 2020 (UTC)