Slashdot Mirror
Windows Media Player 10 Beta Released
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft today officially announced the public availability of Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta. These screenshots reveal how Microsoft is integrating music service subscriptions such as Napster and video service subscription from CinemaNow. Is Microsoft trying to start competing with iTunes with this new music service integration?"
torrent link
There are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that do not.
- Andreas
I've found Winamp 5 stealing 99% of my CPU when it's asked to load a file (any file, MP3, PLS, M3U, anything) from a directory containing a very large amount (1000+) of subdirs and files. It doesn't release CPU until you kill it or hit escape, after which it will take a few minutes for it to close the open diag. The GUI type doesn't matter.
I still use it sometimes, when I want to output something using a Winamp-specific DSP plugin, but Foobar 2000 is MUCH better than Winamp at almost everything except player attractiveness (which I don't care much for). It's the best audio playback program on any OS (this, coming from a Mac OS X and Linux user). For audio, Foobar is the player to beat.
For video on Windows, I stick with Media Player Classic. All you have to do to play almost anything you want is download MPC, ffdshow, Fraunhofer's MPEG-2 codec, QuickTime, RealAlternative, the WMP9 codec pack, and ac3filter. Bam, complete freebie multimedia on Windows without Microsoft's phone-home garbage, and since you're not using the QT Player, there's no reason not to use the official QT download instead of QT Alternative. (It still surprises me that MS can get away with phoning home to a Microsoft server every time you highlight a QuickTime MOV file in Windows Explorer....it's as if it's checking for a codec just so it can display the miniature preview, but WMP hasn't supported direct decoding of the QuickTime format since WMP 6.4. What they really get is the name and filesize of the MOV you're trying to open, even if you're just trying to double-click it from inside a folder so that the real QuickTime Player opens it.)
Yecch, WMP can suck mine twice.
Yup, WMP9 has been out for Macs for ages.
There is a non-redundant part of this post, though. For those who don't want WMP anywhere near their mac, MPlayer is an excellent open source alternative that handles all kinds of video formats, and is overall a great player. Its WMV support is kind of shaky, but most files still play.
And because I'm on the subject, I might as well point out VLC, which in my opinion is the best all-around player for the Mac. It doesn't handle WMV files, though =-\.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
only reason I upgraded windows media player to version 9 was because the Halo 2 teaser trailer would only work on version 9 so that was reason enough for me to upgrade.
If you were running 7 you shouldn't have needed to upgrade. The WM9 codecs work within MP7 and would have automatically downloaded and installed the first time you played WM9 content.
Foobar 2000 for all your audio needs.
BSPlayer for all your video needs.
Koepi's codec pack for all your codec needs.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. -Henry David Thoreau