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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?"
But really, are there any significant innovations possible in media players except for infinitesimal interface polishing? (DRM doesn't count as a feature ;)
I get a feeling they're almost there.
You know, you are absolutely right. When the next chimaera from Redmond is released with the WMP10 music store, it is going to get some serious use out of the average PC user. These technophobes are going to use the obviously inferior MS service just because it is already there and they are afraid of being sued by using anything else (even if they pay for it!).
A testament to that is looking at your less savvy friends'/family members'/co-workers' computers and staring at IE. Even if you tell them of alternatives, they are terrified to install it. One even asked me if Firefox was legal to use, because it wasn't Microsoft!
You have a long way to go folks.
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Ahh... but you see, all new Windows PC's will come with this software installed, just like they came with MSIE. So at first it didn't seem like anything really because there were so many PC's around without MSIE on it. And nobody would go out of their way to upgrade or download MSIE, you're right about that.
To paraphrase a little if I may... "and after that, many people will still use Netscape, Mosaic..."
Kazaa and Gnutella will never come integrated into Windows. Although it would be, potentially, one of the most comical and entertaining battles of our lifetimes to see MS head to head with the RIAA, the world doesn't work that way.
Winamp can integrate Napster, iTunes, everything in the world if it wants to, but that will never change the very same fact that destroyed Netscape.
Winamp is not bundled with Windows.
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>And WHO needs MS mediaplayers anyhow...
Have any pointers to alternatives ?
Plenty of alternatives exist, it depends on what you want to do. I think the idea that anyone would use one "media player" for everything is just stupid - at least when it's a company out for its own interest releasing the player (as opposed to, say, an open-source free software project designed to collate as many formats as possible into one application).
I would never use an MS media player to rip anything. I use EAC/LAME for that.
I would never use an MS media player to play back mp3's. I use iTunes for that, and it works great - so well, in fact, that apart from needed performance tweaks I doubt Apple or anyone else will ever be able to release a better player for this purpose.
I would never use an MS media player to play back QuickTime files - in fact you can't use it for this, as far as I know of. I use QuickTime to play its native format.
I would never use an MS media player to play DVD's. I use WinDVD for that, and it has a lot more DVD playback options than WMP - it's not even close. There is absolutely nothing WMP offers over any of the standalone DVD player apps out there.
In fact, really the *only* thing I would use WMP for is to play back Windows Media files. And I do use Windows Media whenever I do video capture, partly because the Windows Media 9 codec is a nice codec that supports ultra-high resolution as well as 5.1 surround sound, and also because MS gives away a very nice little free video capture and encoder utility called Windows Media Encoder. This is an example where MS is actually providing me something of value, and so I use it.
So I'm not seeing WMP is useless, just that it can never be a jack-of-all-trades, especially with this "DRM 10" built into it (DRM 10? There have been 9 other versions of this?). There is no such thing as a "media player" as far as I'm concerned (I never got mplayer to play all the formats I wanted in Linux either!); there are only mp3 players, DVD players, "windows media" players, Real players, QuickTime players, etc. Each player with its own native format; it's own specialization that it does best, and that gives you the most freedom to use your media as you see fit. All of these companies want to monopolize your media, and you'd be stupid to give up that control to them.
Oh, I also just find it really silly that everyone is now building "media players" to act as web browsers - but only to their online music store addresses! This isn't "integration", this is just a stupid web page rendered in the player window! I can navigate with my own damn browser, thank you - this is another function that media players just should not have.
(yes, I've disabled the music store in iTunes - no way I'd pay 99 cents for a DRM-encrusted song anyway.)