I eagerly installed the Adobe Media Player 1.0 release (built on Adobe AIR by the way). I have to say that it shows promise, and some of the ideas in there are nice but the performance is amazingly bad considering I’m running it on a Mac Book Pro with 4gb of RAM and well spec’d video card / CPU.
At first I thought it was that it was having some issues downloading the files or maybe my system was doing something to give it problems, but nope that was not it. Navigating the interface is an exercise in frustration as it clearly has that ‘we animated this because we could rather should’ feel to it. Sure you can go into the options and turn off the animations but even then it’s slow. Now I’m wondering if the terrible performance is due to it having to download data every time you click on something like navigating around the catalog?
I will keep trying to like it but if this is Adobe’s idea of a challenge to iTunes then they better rethink it fast before they have another failed media playback system on their hands, iTunes is wonderfully fast on any system including my very old Toshiba laptop with XP, but if this is the performance on a well spec’d current system then users will switch off Adobe Media Player fast.
And what about content? So far most of the stuff I have found is just the same content that appears in Podcasts on iTunes and web sites, I am sure Adobe is pushing hard on media content companies like TV networks to deliver content that is only found on the Adobe player, but it always comes down to the same thing, why would I want another tool delivering the same content I already get in a tool I already have and works well?
Adobe Media Player is perhaps best said to be a demonstration of the Adobe AIR concepts but not it’s performance as a platform.
