Microsoft Ends Windows Media Player on the Mac

alphasubzero949 writes "According to News.com, Microsoft has had no plans to update or improve Windows Media Player and has instead thrown its weight behind a third party plugin to fill the void. Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, told News.com, 'It's basically a business decision for Microsoft. Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.'"

Comments

WMP never part of MacBU

[Henriok]

Windows Media Player was not a product that MacBU made, it was sorely lacking in almost every respect and laughing stock of the entire Mac community. It won't be missed. The QuickTime plugin Flip4Mac is better in almost every respect and enabled transcoding to the plethora of formats that QuickTime offers. However.. the free plugin does not enable a Mac user to encode WMV. You'll have to pay for that.

One interessting thing here is that Flip4Mac licenses technology from MS that MS now are paying to get back :)

Re:Closed Formats

[Moridineas]

Lucky you! http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/flip4mac.mspx. They've provided a way to keep watching.

Re:Closed Formats

[aberkvam]

The Flip4Mac components not only provide a way for Mac users to "keep watching", they actually allow Mac users to watch Microsoft Video formats that the Microsoft Product never did. The most obvious example is that there was no good way for Mac users to watch Windows Media 9 Standard videos (WMV3) before the Flip4Mac components came out. (Windows Media Player, VLC, and MPlayer OSX would all choke on them.) Now Mac users can watch them, preview them in the Finder, import and export them, etc.

This is actually a huge upgrade and great news for Mac users.

Re:Safari crashes

[diamondsw]

Try upgrading to 2.0.1, just released. There was a crashing problem in 2.0 and Quicktime 7.0.4 when you leave the video (navigate away, quit Quicktime, etc).

Three Letters

[AoT]

VLC.

I love it to death. It does everything quicktime should do.

videolan.org

Re:Quicktime is no better

[dangitman]

I just paid $AUS4,000 for a system and now I have to pay another $AUS45 to watch something in full screen?

No, you definitely do not have to pay $45. Just play the video in iTunes, or mplayer, or VLC. Who told you that Quicktime was the only was to play videos?

3rd Party Filling the void?

[jtshaw]

I am the first to admit that I had no idea I could even get WMP for my PowerBook.
However, I'm not sure there is a void that needs filling.

MplayerOSX has always worked great for playing anything on my Mac that Quicktime couldn't handle.

Re:Oh dear!

[sebi]

Oh, I'm not actually using the format since it is so bad. Doesn't mean that I don't want to. Unfortunately Windows Media is the only format MLB offers their archives in. Fortunately Real is a working alternative for live broadcasts (and it works surprisingly well) but in the off-season I am pretty much hosed with my mac. The first time I heard of this third-party plugin I was quite enthusiastic, but it didn't work. I just tried again and it still doesn't work for the one thing I need it.

It's a shame, really, since it's such a nice service in theory, but what can you do? Now that WMP on mac is dead I can hope that baseball gets its act together and starts offering the archived games in an alternative format. Real would be enough, but of course I'd be happy with quicktime too.

Entourage

[Kadin2048]

Messenger is basically unnecessary, because there are third-party products that do what it does (MSN support) better, and with better system integration. Messenger as it exists right now would have been a fine program in 2002, but today it's lame. Plus, very few Mac users I know want to only use MSN for Instant Messenging, and that's what the program is geared to. Most people who want to talk to people who use MSN are going to use Adium or one of the other multi-protocol IM clients.

There might be a small niche of users who haven't discovered the joy that is Adium (I'm now a total convert since they built in Address Book integration and encryption) and are still using the standalone MSN client, but I think they'll find that they're better off once they make the switch to another product.

The real MS product that it would be detrimental to the Mac platform to lose is Entourage. Without that, I can't think of an easy way to interact with an Exchange Server (Apple Mail will do the email part, but it won't do the calendaring or PIM functions). Granted I think Exchange is stupid, but it's popular.

Re:Symbiotic relationship?

[Kadin2048]

QuickTime plays avi's just fine.

Er, no it doesn't.

It's not really Quicktime's fault, but has something to do with either how AVI deals with MP3 audio tracks, or how people put MP3 audio into them. I've never been entirely clear.

But the great majority of Divx AVIs that you download (theoretically, or so I'm told, by some guy down at the 7-11 who knows such things) will not play in Quicktime "off the shelf." You'll get a black screen and no audio, or sometimes you'll get video and no audio, or desynced audio and video.

The fix is to run them through a little program called "Divx Doctor," which takes the AVI as an input and produces a Quicktime MOV file, either standalone or as a pointer to the content of the AVI, that you can play with. They work just fine.

Or you can just play the AVIs as-is in VLC, which also has the benefit of supporting playlists and some WMV codecs.

Quicktime technically has the ability to play AVIs, but it's a useless feature because of the way that 90% of the ones you'll find online are put together (Divx video with MP3 audio).