Flip4Mac is a trademarked brand name for Telestream, Inc.'s proprietary digital media tools for the Macintosh. It is particularly known for being the only QuickTime component for Mac OS X that supports Windows Media Video, although there is non-QuickTime OS X software that supports WMV. They offer a free player while charging for their production versions.
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The "Windows Media Components for QuickTime" allow free transparent playback of the most common Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio formats on Mac OS X inside QuickTime applications and web browsers.
On January 12, 2006, Microsoft discontinued their own Windows Media Player for Mac OS X and began distributing Flip4Mac WMV Player for free instead. Both Flip4Mac's and Microsoft's websites list the product as "Windows Media Components for QuickTime by Flip4Mac". The product refers to itself during install as "Flip4Mac WMV."
In 2006, Google sponsored the development of an open source implementation of Windows Media Video 3 playback, as part of the Google Summer of Code (open source code for Windows Media Audio and older versions of WMV already existed). The program succeeded in developing WMV3 support, which was contributed to the ffmpeg project, and other software projects that use ffmpeg benefitted as well. WMV3 support was introduced in both VLC media player 0.8.6 and MPlayer OS X 1.0rc1 in December 2006.