14 DAY TRIAL // BS.Player is one of the “dinosaurs” of video players and, although it has faced fierce adversaries like MV2 Player or Media Player Classic, it’s still the choice of thousands of users around the world. It stands out from the crowd thanks to a long list of features, and here are just a few of them: multiple audio stream switching, bookmarks and chapters support, playback of incomplete AVI files and locked files, frame capture.
Ever since the year 2000, BS.Player has survived on the scene as one of the most popular software in its field. Of course, not everything was so peachy and, in time, Webteh had to make some compromises. The least pleasant for its users and the software community was shifting from freeware to adware. Of course, adware doesn’t necessarily mean “bad” – however, sadly, in the case of BS.Player, it did: BS.Player forced its users to install spyware.
Last year, I did a piece on the spyware components included in BS and on how, because of them, all antivirus programs detected the application as malware. WhenU Save was bundled with the software and, as much as its producer company struggled to steer away from accusations, security experts proved time and again that WhenU indeed sent private user information to “the mothership.” For a long time, this didn’t seem to bother the producers of BS.Player, but now, a year and a half after writing said article explaining why we could not list BS.Player, one of our users from the board brought to our attention the fact that the software no longer included malicious components.
The download process didn’t end with virus alerts from my security programs and, as further tests confirmed, installing BS.Player doesn’t pose a serious threat to a computer’s health or security. Still, as you might have noticed, neither here nor in the title did I say that the software was clean again. No, BS.Player is still not out of bushes. Webteh advertised it as freeware when, in fact, it included spyware, and it keeps listing it as free now, when, safe to say, it’s what we’d actually call adware. Why? There are not one, nor two, but three reasons which will help you understand.
First of all, BS.Player still offers to install a third-party application, which it doesn’t require to fully function: BS.ControlBar. Fortunately, as opposed to WhenU Save, this toolbar doesn’t pose a threat to your computer’s security as all security programs find it to be 100% clean of malicious components. In the same installation window, you will also be asked if you wish to change your browser’s home page and search provider. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, these changes to your system are not mandatory and, therefore, BS.Player cannot be considered spyware but, certainly, neither can it be said to be 100% clean. And so, although marked as adware, BS.Player is once again safe to install and back on Softpedia.
