Following news on the internet that Adobe has released a Macintosh version of its new Adobe Media Player (hey, hasn't there already been a media player on the market for years called AMP? :-)) I ventured forth and installed said program.

Okay, so it's a 1.0 product. It can only get better, because I cannot imagine how it could get any worse. I'm not into video in iTunes, so I was trying out Adobe Media Player with a fresh perspective.

First of all, it installs through the use of Flash, so it's pretty straightforward and potentially cross-platform to just install it directly through a web site. On one hand this made it simple but on the other hand I now worry about what kind of security has been built into Flash to keep malicious sites from installing software on my Mac, maybe without my knowledge. It may be that Flash is becoming too powerful, but that's a debate for another article. Pending any news on the security of web-based Flash installs of applications into my system applications folder, I give Adobe a 5 out of 5 for simplicity of the install.

The Adobe Media Player interface is all Flash and well designed. It looks good, has some nice, fluid animations when you switch to different parts of the program (say going from my library to the settings which I did immediately) and is not at all difficult to find online videos to watch. You can perform a text search, click on a button for a genre (sci-fi or comedy or news or action, etc.) and drill down through a few pages to locate specific programs and a listing of all available episodes. However when I viewed the episode listing for The Twilight Zone, what I got were small thumbnails (good) and only a few words of what appeared to have been intended to be much longer descriptions, so it was not easy to figure out which episodes I was selecting. Overall I give them a 3 out of 5 for the interface, mainly because of this shortcoming.

How about playing the video? It looks like some content provided by Adobe will be pay-for and others will be ad-sponsored with commercials stuck into the video stream. In the case of The Twilight Zone, it was ad-sponsored. The opening commercial came right up and played after a couple of seconds wait. Not bad. Then I got an error message telling me there was a problem with the video stream and to click the Back button and try again. This promptly displayed another opening commercial before giving me the same error about the video stream. Congratulations Adobe, you appear to have created a terrific program for watching only the ads most people are trying to find ways to avoid (Tivo, etc.). I have to give Adobe Media Player a 1 out of 5 for ease of use since I was unable to actually watch anything.

After two failed attempts to watch The Twilight Zone, I quit Adobe Media Player via the normal MacOS X method of Cmd-Q. The window went away but the icon remained in my Dock for several minutes, indicating that the program was still active. I had to force quit it, which actually took around 10 seconds (normally OSX will force quit an errant program in less than 5). I'll give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and give them a 3 out of 5 for program stability, only because the program itself did not crash or seem to create any problems while it was running.