Zoom Player is a very fast media player. Prior to Zoom Player, playing media files on the PC was either overly simplistic for the Power User or overly cryptic to the common user. Zoom Player tries to both simplify the playback experience for the common user, while giving the Power Users all the tools and interfaces they may require to manipulate their playback environment to their exact specification.

Windows Media Player is the all-in-one media player that provides the best experience for discovering, playing, and taking your digital entertainment anywhere--on Windows XP-based PCs and the widest choice of portable devices.

Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity music and video player for Windows. Winamp supports MP3, CD, WAV and other audio formats, custom appearances called skins, plus audio visualization and audio effect plug-ins. additional features including free-form skins, a new decoder, built-in cross fade, and an advanced Media Library

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source.

RealPlayer (renamed from RealOne) allows your system to play Real Media files (.ra .ram)

This new version also allows you to buy and download music that plays on more than 100 portable devices, including the iPod.

Real Alternative allows your system to play Real Media files (.ra .ram) without having to install the full version of RealPlayer

Quintessential is a multi format audio player with lots of extra features. With its new extended freeform skinning engine and plethora of feature extending plugins Quintessential Player can be whatever you want it to be.

QuickTime Player from Apple allows the playback of quicktime movies (.mov) and many other formats:

QuickTime Alternative allows your system to play QuickTime movie files (.mov) without having to install the full version of the Quicktime Player. It includes the browser plugins to allow seemless playback of movies within webpages.