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Microsoft Plans Media Player for Linux?
theancient1 writes "According to this article, Microsoft is considering releasing a Linux version of Windows Media Player. 'Paul Boudreau, Microsoft's programme manager for music and entertainment, said at a briefing on the software giant's plans for digital media: We see a need for Unix players and are working in that direction, including Linux.' Of course, a little quote is quite a bit different from actually seeing a product, but it's still not exactly expected."
This is the old vaporware trick all over again. M$ are affraid a good OSS video viewer will emerge on Linux. Thus they announce an upcoming version of the MediaPlayer so no one will bother to write/perfect an OSS version.
All mistakes in spelling and grammar are licensed under the GPL.
a sig with any other name would be as witty
To quote the article:
However, Boudreau said that the Apple Macintosh was more important today because it is used for "relevant content creation", and he confirmed that Media Player for the Mac would have digital rights management (DRM) software built-in.
Microsoft has never really acknowleged any competition from Apple--after all, there isn't much of a server market for Macs. Therefore, it doesn't seem too surprising that they might port a software product over to the Mac platform.
However, Microsoft has admitted Linux to be a major competitor and cause of concern. Can we really expect them to begin porting softare to run under *nix?
This is beginning to look similar to AT&T before they were split up. As Bell Labs was making lots of money selling circuits to MCI and Sprint, the long distance division was struggling to come up with new ways to squash those other companies. It shouldn't be long before Microsoft is doing the same--developing software for Linux, while simultaneously trying to keep the OS from taking over their precious NT Server market.
Personally, I am very interested to see where this leads.
What I should have said was nothing.
"install media player as root" then the program totally messes up the system, for "optimalisation" purposes.. next thing you know your system is as buggy as a smartupdated version of win98.
Guess who will be the big winner?...
Cool initiave though.. :)
Regards,
Oh please, as though Real is any better. Right now there are two standards in streaming media. Real and MS. Real has given us old versions (5.x) (thanks, but every decent site requires G2 these days), and one very buggy very, very alpha version of G2. What updates have they made to their Linux G2 player? none!!
If MS releases player, then Real will have competition. If they want Linux market-share, they'll have to do a little better than one bug-riddled alpha release. Then MS will have to raise it's standards, and in a few iterations we'll have the same or better quality players as the windows/mac crowd.
Either that, or this is a vaporware announcement, they'll never make a release, and Real will go back to pretending Linux doesn't exist. In other words, we'll be back to where we are now.
0 1 - just my two bits
If they are going to be the dominant force in streaming media, they need to support all platforms.
Temporarily. Once they crush all of the other streaming media formats, then they can drop support for all other platforms than their own and maybe the Mac, if there is something they need to coerce Apple to do. Once that is done, they can make some small "upgrades" that break backwards compatibility, and convince everyone only to support their new format. Then every other platform is locked out of streaming media.
It is for this reason that I'd prefer to support RealPlayer, and like to see Apple release a QuickTime for Linux and other platforms. Real doesn't really have a reason to cut other platforms off, and Apple probably will never make the Mac a dominant enough platform that they could afford not to support other platforms.
It wasn't an announcement. I was at the press conference, and this was a response to a lot of very hard questioning on the direction of MS's audio tools.
The important (IMHO) thing was not the discussion of a Unix ASF player, but the fact that Microsoft were willing to discuss the licensing of the WMA codecs.
S.
I wish I had some moderator points. It was called Netshow. I've used (and since uninstalled) it too. I can't believe that the top scored post in this discussion is a vaporware claim. Admittedly, it looks like they've since pulled it from their site, but check out this Techweb article from 1998.
As a result of the last /. article on the need for streaming media I (1) checked out icecast (1b) compiled it from source (2) tried out XMMS's streaming mp3 feature (2b) compiled it from source (3) spent a couple of hours listening to broadcast audio from greenwitch (4) figured out how to make netscape start the webcast automatically, just by clicking on the .mpu link.
The XMMS streaming audio is solid as a rock. Even without using the realtime priority feature, I couldn't get it to skip. (I guess I could if I tried *really* hard) The audio quality is superb - considering the bit rate and the miniscule speakers on my laptop. Gosh, that equalizer helps, and they do a lovely job of compression-amplifying. If you've been turned off by crappy streaming audio from Realnetworks, you have to try this.
My conclusion is, this totally rocks, and we don't need Microsoft's help in getting streaming media on Linux. Just the opposite I'd say. What we need to do is (1) beat on more sites to give us streaming mp3 (or we won't bloody go to your site, thanks) (2) give the people that are working on free video codecs for Linux all the support we can.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.