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Declawing Windows: Impossible?
hyrdra writes: "This story on CNN seems to indicate the intentions of the nine remaining states in the ongoing anti-trust case against Microsoft: to produce a stripped down version of Windows that will allow 3rd party vendors to insert components such as browsers, media players, and IM clients. While this may not be news, Microsoft's defense is. Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player. Removing them would result in a slower, much-less user friendly Windows that would be a support nightmare."
Well maybe things are a little more complex than that. Dont take everything at face value. Thats your first lesson for joining the "REAL WORLD".
You already CAN install an alternate browser.
You already CAN use an alternate IM system.
You already CAN use another media player.
So what, exactly, is all the bitching about? Or is it just random pointless anti-MS bitching?
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
"I wonder if /. can go a week without posting a MS bashing story? "
/. going more than a couple of days without posting a MS bashing story.
Actually I don't remember
Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.
.avi that all video editing programs understand).
Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into
Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.
It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.
Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.
In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.