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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?"
I wish Microsoft was spending a bit more time on toning down the bloat-ware aspect of this piece of software. I've got a nice fast Athlon XP processor and a gig of RAM etc... and WMP still takes 3 or 4 seconds to get going. Not a big deal, I guess, but come on. By 1998 standards I've got a freakin' supercomputer.
I noticed on the same page that I could get WMP 9 for OS X. I would have sworn that was not there before, as I wanted to view the Epson Print Acadamy and it needed WMP9, which I could not find at the time - now the sample video works just fine whereas before I could not get video. Epson had also mentioned to me via support email that Microsoft was going to release WMP9 sometime at the end of March.
The wierd thing about that is that when you download WMP9 for OS X, the installer is dated October 27th, 2003. A suspicious person would speculate that Microsoft wants to make sure the Mac lags a version behind Windows for WMP support, and they would not release the final version of WMP9 for OS X until WMP10 was ready for beta test.
Note that this WMP9 also claims to support the same DRM as Windows WMP9. I have no such protected files to test against so I don't know how well that works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder if once its fully released if microsoft will say that there is a major flaw in previous version of media players and force people to upgrade to the newer version. With the latest computer viruses people are applying patches without really understanding the impacts of what functionality they introduce like the newer versions of DRM. Maybe this is how microsoft envisage migrating users to DRM.
Is it uninstallable? I mean, after seeing the _last_ foray of MS into the Media Player market, it had better be removable.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
And, of course, nothing really requires XP or IE for download. Firefox on Linux saved the installer just nice after switching the user agent string.
Next question is, does it work with wine? ^_^
(not that I'd use it anyway when mplayer is just a click away)
Well it very clearly states that "A few changes to the GUI [...]the options haven't changed much though." which is a common MS practice.
When will they learn? If people pay for a "service", they expect to own what they pay for. The obvious exceptions might be something like netflix where you have to return the physical media to get new ones... simple, elegant, or Tivo, where you're really paying for enhanced scheduling, and you can own it if you want.
It's pretty clear that M$ is shooting in the dark, hoping to find some hit, while they make bank off their other products. They have time, they can wait pretty much forever.
1) Enter a section of the software market with a new Microsoft product.
2) Include it free with Windows, thereby eliminating the competition's ability to compete because users are too lazy to download competing software.
3) Profit.
4) When the DoJ gets upset, pay them off by offering to donate massive amounts of Microsoft software to schools, thereby leading students to learn Microsoft software rather than competing products.
5) Profit more.
6) Repeat.
- New skin (who cares? I play music and movies on it, not look at decorated borders)
:-P)
- Integrated online stores (I really think these should be on the web instead of in the player... anyway, I won't use them since they probably just offer WMA, being in Microsoft's player)
- Enhanced device support (nice feature, but I don't have a NOMAD or Lyra player so no reason to use this for that either)
- Improved All-in-One Smart Jukebox (not sure how much this would help me since other players already support media libraries... this feature alone would probably not make me switch anyway
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I *love* Itunes' incremental search/type ahead find feature. It's one of the few media players that lets you just type "techno" into a text box and instantly shows all the songs with techno in their tag.
http://www.perthonline.net
I think I'll stick with:
bash: rtfm: command not found
I hate to sound cynical but the Microsoft Multimedia Transport Protocol (MTP) seems to be silently screaming the word "vulnerability." I know it's just to connect devices, but I have a feeling that somehow, some way, it's got some sort of security issues that are going to surface shortly after its released.
The level of integration is getting to ridiculous proportions.
I hated having media files playing in my browser; the interface is terrible, and crippled. I hated opening PDFs in my browser; it's harder to read that way (less screen-space to read in) and they often hide important controls too. I hated Flash in my browser; I can disable GIF animations, but Flash gives me no control at all, plus the security problems, and added annoyance of all ads being massively animated, and having sound...
Now, to add insult to injury, instead of integrating the applications inside the browser, they are putting the browser inside the programs. Good god man! You can't tell me that isn't going to be MASSIVELY annoying and cumbersome.
Screw them all. All applications launched from my browser open in a seperate window of their own, and do whatever I tell them to do. All of my browsing is done outside of my unrelated applications, and that's the way it's going to stay.
Screw you Microsoft guys, I'm going home.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A lot of people out there want to organise their music better. Why would you have such a bulky looking program as WMP 10, which doesn't organise your music. Sure, iTunes is bulky, but it is truly intuitive. I made the switch from Winamp 3 to iTunes just before I bought my iPod, and havent looked back. WMP 8 has been collecting dust for ages. There needs to be a decent reason to warrant downloading this update, I just see it as a waste of time, not just to clutter your screen with more ads. Sure, Microsoft may be planning on organising data better in Longhorn, but how many years away is that now?
By "end-to-end", do they mean up your end for Microsoft's ends ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Already happening. The EU anti-trust investigation was around media player. However that seems driven mostly by Real's sour grapes ("People don't use real because WMP is on the desktop". No, people don't use real because it's been a bloated heap of spyware driven shit, with an awful set of codecs).
They call that integration! Come on, it's just an embedded web browser. Web-based stores are designed (and I use that term loosely) for use in a web-browser. For M$'s own sake I hope they can come up with better 'Store' integration for WMP in terms of design and usability else they're just giving the marekt to iTunes. Then again, Microsoft do know their market, and it's not one driven by innovation.
No mention of CD-Text support. Why won't Microsoft add this?
Its TOTAL crap... VLC from www.videolan.org 60% faster at rendering most wmv files in fullscreen stretch mode under Mac OS X 10.3.x compared to latet MS Windows bloatware class-happy garbage.
Try it yourself!!!! openup a high-rez (640x480) wmv using VLC and do it again under Microsofts while running OSX.
Miscrosoft only displays EVERY OTHER VIDEO FRAME and also has tearing and other anololies.
VLC is fast and smooth and does not need to install anything in the OS, and does not require a reboot to install.
MS is doomed.
They pay as little as they can for their engineers and contractors and it shows.
Indeed. I have managed to steer clear of WMP for some time, preferring instead iTunes for MP3, and a collection of other apps for video. I do not use WMA format and do not intend to. So far, my audio experience has been license-free.
It seems to me that the further the development of WMP goes, the more anti-privacy features are included (like the whole Media Rights Management thing), which is why I will be very cautiously examining version 10 when it leaves "beta".
$ mv *.sig >/dev/null