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?"

Comments

I Wish

[Walker2323]

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.

So is WMP 9 for OS X new?

[SuperKendall]

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.

Forced upgrades for DRM

[noelo]

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.

And what about...

[Tuxedo Jack]

Is it uninstallable? I mean, after seeing the _last_ foray of MS into the Media Player market, it had better be removable.

Integration is getting ridiculous...

[evilviper]

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.