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Windows Could Lose Media Player in Europe?
Chris Gondek writes "If Microsoft cannot settle an antitrust case brought by European Union regulators, the company may be ordered to remove Windows Media Player as an integrated feature of the dominant Windows operating system, at least for personal computers sold in Europe.
The European Commission also could order Microsoft to include rival media players with Windows to make those products as easy for users to access as Microsoft's own music and video player."
Because the ulitmate sin in anti-trust law is the use of a monopoly in one thing to try to move into another thing where there used to be competition.
Being forced to include third-party software is simply the punitive action to punish MS for a past misdeed and help the companies who were the victim of that cheating.
How exactly would you download a browser without one coming pre-installed? It would be either up to your ISP to provide one, or you going out to buy one.
when you consider that MS codec was chosen as the new stadard for HD DVDs, and MS had to truly make the standard "open" before they got this boondoggle. What would be the ramifications of this? In Europe, MS OSes would have to be shipped with Third Party implementations? That might be a good thing.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Since when is a media player a core component of an operating system?
.wav player, it just got more and more complex as time went on until we got the bloatware that WMP is today. Some people long for the "old style" WMP, which is exactly why MPlayer2.exe is still in windows.
I'd say somewhere around Windows 1.0. There's always been a media player of some kind of simple
Media Player Classic.
Winamp. (2; I don't recommend Winamp 3 and 5 as much, though many would probably disagree)
Probably a bunch of others, but these are the ones I use.
I wonder if they will limit this to commercial software (with the spyware). I hope that they will include stuff like Real alternative:
k li/
http://www.k-litecodecpack.com/
or Media Player Classic:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliver
They are not going to be required to sell a *separate* WMP-free version, twhat's being considered is that they will ONLY be abre to sell a WMP-free version here in Europe. There is no incentive to make it work badly when it's all they can sell.
Anyone who wants to see media players competing on quality and price rather than the current unfair advantage WMP has will benefit.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The REASON Europe is in such a snit about media player, is they realise that everybody will need
it to view streaming news/information. This will
become more and more popular, to the point where
that is where you watch all your news.
Think about it, what would the web be like if
microsoft (or any other corporation for that matter)
OWENED the standards?
If the streaming media is done to a published standard, this is not really a problem - but
we all know how microsoft deals with HTML
and tried to with JAVA. An awful lot of people write pages to suit IE at the expense of the standard- so if you ar'nt using it your fucked
not because other browsers are bad but because people HVE to have it work on IE first.
If the same thing happens with streaming
media- You will need to pay MS to see the news.
The soulution is to write a streaming standard
and implimentation and get government to ENFORCE
it. Ie you want to stream media? here are the tools
there're free, here's all the documentation - it's free, go wild. Oh BTW, you break this standard
and you and the CEO will be going to prison, not pay a fine, weasel in court for eight years but straight to"enlarge my asshole at your pleasure bubba" prison.
then it doesn't matter if Microsoft bundle it or
not the fact that realplayer and other companies
may or may not make money is irrelevant.
Cheers
Stephen
It's not 'bundle the competition', the issue is 'unwire from the default install so that OEMs can unbundle it without (cost) penalties if they feel like doing so'. No sane retailer will ship a consumer Windows pc without a media player, but why does it have to be WMP by default? Because MS says it's a critical component of the operating system.
Please remind me how is WMP so critical to, say 2003 Server? and if it's not, how come the desktop variant is sooo diferent?
What they're doing is similar to what happens in the printer world - you buy the printer cheap and the cartriges expensive and with smart chips to fend off competition if not outright block it. You get WMP for free and then you have to stick to wm formats and their favorite flavor of rights management and such. How would you like WMP-only DVDs? they're coming to a store next to you anyway.
That's not entirely true. Sure all the HTML rendering functions used by Windows help, Explorer, etc are implemented in MSHTML.dll but it's not impossible to register a different HTML renderer. Infact a while back someone wrote a Gecko ActiveX control that did all of that, you could register it and all those APIs would then call on Gecko for the rendering instead of MSHTML. But IIRC it was a huge PITA to keep the control up to date, and that combined with the general lack of interest made him stop maintaining it.
I'm just asking this because I couldn't tell if you knew it was an option.
When you go to Add/Remove Programs, click the button labeled "Add Remove Windows Components". They are both listed there.
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I don't have this problem at all. I think your lieing. I use winamp for MP3, and i use BSplayer for Divx and Xvid. I changed *.avi to BSplayer a long time ago and MP3 to winamp, have since had to upgrade to XP1, didn't change, did numerous security updates, didn't change. I think your doing something wrong.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Ummm...I don't know how you installed Firefox, but there's an option (tools->options->general->make default browser) to make it your default browser. On my windows box when I click a link anywhere, it opens Firefox.
OK.... But there is Enterprise Edition that is lean, clean and free from the bloatware sydrome: http://forms.real.com/rnforms/products/tools/red/ Just enter nonsense in the form.
And bitch about AOL/Time Warner, well tell me if you'd bitch about this. My friend doesn't use pop3 email. She uses webmail, like hotmail, like a lot of people that are college students and therefor aren't in the same house or with the same ISP for long. So they keep webmail. Anyhow, she apparently recieved one of the numerous viruses going around that use your computer as a spam host, and because roadrunner cables email server is an open relay to anyone on their network(meaning no authentication on outgoing mail, other than ensuring it's one of their IPs.) her computer spammed people from their server. For this they shut off her internet connection and told her to fix the problem because the next time they get complaints they trace back to her they will cancel her service.
She is no computer guru, and I had to drive a couple hours to clean up her system and install a router with NAT and a firewall.
While I was talking to their customer service I asked them if they could just block her IP on their mail server, because I wouldn't be able to drive down there for a week. And they said it would take too much work and it isn't their responsibility. So she had to leave her computer off for days, waiting for me to come down.
Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think they should punish users for things that effected the whole internet and that are hard enough to get rid of that it even takes us IT guys a couple hours to repair a damaged system.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Funny thing ...
...
...
Try that for kicks. Then open Explorer (your file browser); in the address field type in "http://slashdot.org" and hey presto - Internet Explorer opens Slashdot
I thought you said you removed it?
No, what you do is remove the SHORTCUTS for it. Not quite the same thing now, is it?
Imagine if all programs were "uninstalled" like that. Your 2 GB $program would still take up 2 GB of space, that you can't reclaim, and it still takes up RAM. Not quite what I have in mind, when I uninstall programs
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I'm so fucking sick of hearing this response when people talk about removing IE or media player.
All that does is remove the icons! That's not the same as uninstalling the software.
Don't believe me? After "removing" something, "add" it again. It's amazing, you don't need any installation files to add it, because the program is already installed!
Have you tried Linux yet?
Oh, and yes, if you uninstall the radio in some pontiacs, your power antenna stops working, and in some other occassions your security system will never be the same. Also, ever seen the proprietary plugs GM uses, so that if you want to get a different head unit all you know is you have a plug with 14 wires and none of them are labeled.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I thought you said you removed it? No, what you do is remove the SHORTCUTS for it. Not quite the same thing now, is it?
The program that starts up when you do a ShellExecute() on a URL depends on a fully documented registry setting. If you install Firefox and tell it to become your default browser, not only does it take over IE's spot on XP's start menu, but it also becomes the browser that runs when you do Start > Run > "http://slashdot.org"
If you just drag the IE icon off your desktop to the Recycle Bin; then click "OK" on the dialog box that warns you that you're not really deleting the program, just the shortcut; then you have no real excuse for complaining that IE is still around.
Of course, you still can't "uninstall" IE because it is a system component. Windows Explorer uses it, the Windows Help system uses it, and numerous applications (even some that you wouldn't expect are using an HTML interface, since you can use IE to make very Win32-ish UIs) use it. Mozilla/Firefox can't replace all of those uses of IE simply because they're consciously decided not to allow their browser to do some of the advanced component scripting that IE allows; and that's required for a good number of those uses of the IE control.
NO CARRIER
No different than removing other programs except windows did you the favor of sorting and categorizing windows programs in their own location
There is one difference that you missed -- the fact that all it does is remove the shortcuts to it from the desktop and start menu. I believe the post you replied to was referring to completely taking the program out of the system, not just removing the shortcuts to it. I don't think the poster is dumb.
-matt
I agree with you completely.
If the OS uses a file browser (Windows Explorer) that uses the same engine as the web browser (IE), the web browser should be uninstallable and all web-enabled features of the file browser should cease to function. If Microsoft REALLY wants to render an image preview using the jpeg decoder in the browsing engine, fine, leave that on. But the file browser should not be expected to creep out onto the internet using the web browser's network code. If I select an html file (which may or may not contain undesirable elements like a tracking bitmap bug) in the file browser, I DON'T want my file browser to trigger that bug using the rendering and network code I've just disabled. Hell, that's something that shouldn't happen anyways.
Likewise with a media platform. If I disable WMP, Explorer should not be allowed to attempt to download codecs or licenses (SHIT!) just to preview media files in the file browser. Sad to say, I haven't owned a Mac since pre-OS X days, but on Mac OS Classic I could uninstall QuickTime and be perfectly happy. Programs that relied on it would break, but at least it was up to me. This ability did not hinder developers from adopting and using the technology. The QuickTime platform became ubiquitous in the Mac world, just for having been made available, not by being force-fed to users.
By not allowing its products to be disabled completely, Microsoft proves that they apparently do not share the same confidence in their products as Apple does. Monopoly power at work, obviously.
I know it's a joke, but it's possible to download Mozilla without using IE (ignoring sticking the Mozilla installer on a disk). Windows includes an ftp client that has nothing to do with IE.
Some (all?) versions of Windows also include a modem comm program, so you can textdump/kermit/x/y/z-modem files to yourself if you have a dial-up shell account somewhere, or know of any file-sharing BBSes.
Finally there's null modem file sharing, parallel port file sharing, and LAN file sharing.