Try VLC media player. It will just about play anything and can even convert formats.

Btw, the oldest is still the best. I convert everything I ever get to MP4 video with AAC 5.1 surround sound with stereo backward compatibility. This allows me to chrome cast it, or play on any device capable of handling it (which is virtually any device currently on the market). I even have a couple of shell scripts for converting various other types to MP4 on my Mac. Also, with the right BPS settings for video and Audio, you can take a rather large file and compress it with little loss.

Anyway, check out VLC media player and see what you think.

-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Media conversion Dept.

> On May 12, 2020, at 6:36 PM, Joe Lowder via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> Please help ...
> 
> After searching the 'net for information about
> which audio and video formats are best, and why,
> I am more confused than ever.
> 
> On my system, I came across some old audio files with
> the file-name suffix .mid but I could not get those
> files to play with vlc, smplayer, amarok, or audacity.
> 
> So, I went to several online file conversion sites
> trying to find one that would work best to do some
> file conversions, and that confused the subject further.
> 
> So, I'm hoping that the PLUG brain trust can provide
> better information about this.
> 
> The only file conversion site that I found that could
> deal with the .mid files was: www.zamzar.com
> 
> When I converted one of my files, music.mid to mp3,
> the file played fine, but it increased the file size
> from 6329 to 3163566, which seemed weird? Why so?
> 
> ------6329 Apr 12  2003 music.mid
> ---3163566 May 11 19:41 music.mp3
> ---3362836 May 12 00:28 music.ogg
> --37962478 May 12 00:29 music.wav
> 
> I also gried to convert the same file to .ogg and to .wav
> with the size results seen above. This makes no sense.
> 
> Why would such a small source file be blown up to such
> huge sizes and all sound the same?
> 
> Similar question about video files:
> 46235648 Jul 18  2018 workshop2.VOB
> 16811516 Jul 18  2018 workshop2.mkv
> 51575152 May 12 00:14 workshop2.mp4
> 
> Which of these three is a preferable format?
> The all seem to look identical (to me) when played.
> Why would the conversion from the original VOB to
> mkv become so much smaller a file size and why
> would the conversion from VOB to mp4 increase the size?
> 
> Hope so someone can help me make sense of this.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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