Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
You will see microsoft pulling all support for Apple out in the near future, due to the fact that Apple will be competing with them in the near future in the OS market.
If Microsoft is not prepared to support their products on competitor's operating systems, they should not be allowed to develop closed formats, APIs or interfaces.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Actually, it's a bad decision for Microsoft. Since they won't be able to claim that their evil DRM works for everyone (they silently ignore Unices), judges/govt monkeys will be more likely to see that DRM as something wrong. Also, the unwashed masses are more likely to trip into it as well, thus increasing the public awareness.
Ahh, good. Anything bad for WM* and friends is great news for us.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Provided that Microsoft keeps licensing this plugin and giving it away for free, this is good news for Mac users. The plugin is a much better option than Windows Media Player, allowing you to play Windows Media files in a nicer GUI.
Microsoft probably didn't want to update Media Player to be a universal binary, so decided upon this option. They are distributing the plugin on their website for free, so this is a win-win situation.
During my entire Mac using experience (3 or 4 years now), Windows Media Player on my mac would work for about a week. Then it would suddenly stop working. The only thing that would get it working again was a fresh install, which of course I wasn't going to do, since MPlayer plays wmvs nicely. Oddly enough though, the upgrade to 10.4.4 made WMP work..once. Then a friend linked me to the quicktime plugin. Thus far it works great. Best move microsoft has made in a long time...
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
So they've decided it doesn't make sense to continue development of a free (to us) piece of software on a platform that is in the decided minority when it comes to desktops. Makes sense to me. They've even pointed us toward a third-party solution that'll continue to allow us Mac users to watch Windows media - granted, it's one that many of us have already heard about.
So why is Microsoft behaving more or less reasonably as of late? Are they losing their guerilla edge in middle age? Lord knows it hasn't been (US) government pressure.
#DeleteChrome
Apple is keeping fairly quiet about it (I assume to keep Microsoft as happy as possible), but the iWork apps have slowly become very useful tools. Keynote is a very useful program which puts together beautiful presentations - I would actually rather use Keynote than PP. Pages is a little behind MS Word at this point, but it it much better than OOo, especially in the ability to read the .doc format.
I own a PowerBook, and for me to have basic functionality in video support, you have to pay for it.
Basic functionality like Full Screen support, what the?!?
I just paid $AUS4,000 for a system and now I have to pay another $AUS45 to watch something in full screen?
Apple might be all funky and groovey, but they really bleed every cent out of you for any added features.
This stuff should be stock standard.
On my god, mod me down - I've just flamed Apple!
No, it's not directly a result of a lawsuit. I'm sure that about 90% of their motivation for doing this was so that their lawyers could argue that they weren't trying to leverage the windows monopoly; but now it seems that the name microsoft doesn't bring to mind the evil connotations it once did, thanks to bill gates starting a 50 billion dollar foundation. =P
I'm not saying this is his motivation, the publicity seems to have really payed off. =P I predict we start seeing more of this. (i.e. no more full-blown office-on-mac - just converter software)
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
WMP9 is the only thing that will allow you to listen to Sirius radio streams. Flip4Mac actually prevents WMP plugin from working with Sirius. I wish Apple would make iTunes work with Sirius so I could listen through my Airport Express.
Just installed Flip4Mac from the Microsoft download page, and while it works, Safari now crashes if I switch tabs or navigate away from the page after playing a clip.
I might try a reboot - can anyone remember how to reboot a PowerBook? It's been a while.
I never considered it weird myself and actually kind of enjoyed it for some twisted reason. What is weird to me though is that it feels like they're dropping things left and right. I realize it's only two products thus far, but IE and Windows Media Player for Mac have been around for quite some time.
Is the rest of the Mactopia line going to be on the chopping block next? Is Microsoft gearing up for an all-out "platform-warm" with Apple and planning to remove their presences from OS X completely?
Seriously...
VirtualPC will probably become obsolete since under OS X/Intel it will just be a crappy additional (and somewhat unrequired) layer.
Apple is almost building an Office Suite with Pages, Keynote, Mail and iCal. Will Office matter on OS X in the coming years?
That really only leaves Messenger and Remote Desktop, which aren't even the big players for the MS MacBU. Will be interesting to see what happens.
I installed it. Does a GREAT job with nearly every WMV that Media Player can't handle, but you'll still need WMP around for some files. I had something from TechTV that was all distorted with F4M but plays fine in the old player.
Anyway, it wasn't created by MS, but actually licensed from Telestream, Inc.. This can be verified by the press release from them, but also because the plugin actually phones home to FlipCenter.com when it is used -- probably for update checks.
Obviously, it's a little half-baked. I would have expected it to check for updates from Microsoft's site or not at all. The update checks can be disabled in the prefs, but I haven't yet verified that this is what it was doing and instead just blocked any outgoing requests from it period.
I've complained to web developers before about this and was given the usual canned marketshare/statistics crap. Some developers are just lazy and will flat out refuse to consider using more than one format.
I've always suspected that Microsoft has kept some support for Apple going to counter-act any potential monopoly claims.
While Apple appears to provide a competing product Microsoft can always maintain that they don't have a complete monopoly and so are less likely to be the subject of calls to split them up.
This made business sence at Microsoft because Apple wasn't really a competitor... however, I believe Microsoft sees Apple to be an increasing risk (not "risc" ?!) and so is cutting back on Mac products which don't have a revenue stream.
If Apple's move to Intel has the effect of increasing Apple's market share expect Microsoft to withdraw Microsoft Office. Indeed, I expect Microsoft will be painfully slow to release an x86 native MacOffice at all.
We'll see.
return 0; }
that this Flip4Mac disabled viewing of some WMVs on websites that WMP for the Mac could play.. I think it's because it can't h andle WMP v10 files or DRMed files.
Free stuff without getting the referrals? http://referralaccelerated.com
Like anyone cares that there is no more WMP on the Mac...
/. suggests that Microsoft open-sources WMP for the Mac...
I stopped using WMP a LONG time ago and switched to using VLC for my movie playback needs - Windows, Mac, Linux, *BSD, and BeOS... At least with VLC on an unsecured box I know what is in the file or stream I am trying to play, and hell, the view messages feature is one of the best damn tools ever included - I use it all the time to help my ignorant-of-such-things-as-codecs to figure out what codec they need to download and install.
I don't think anyone ever gave a damn anyways... One less piece of crappy software in the world now...
I swear to Gawd I'll go postal if someone on
That computer was worked on by an egotistical maniac with a revenge demon on his shoulder!
Windows Media player for Mac was a joke anyway. Very buggy, playback would stop/hang randomly. It's been there, and broken for years .. if only the format was open enough for others to implement working codecs.
Whaa...? But I watched the whole keynote. Is there more?
WMP on the Mac is probably about the crappiest out there, Real included, and that's saying something. Unfortunately I've noticed that a lot of sites have started to go down the .wma file route for video content, which is a shame, but also inevitable, given the clueless PC hoards out there. There are some decent third party efforts, so that's OK, but what would be ideal would be for Apple to be allowed to develop and bundle a WM codec for QuickTime, so that content "just works" when played back, as it should. Since this would no longer be taking anything away from MS (quite the opposite), MS should go ahead and give them the rights to do this...
Of course, Apple might not want to, since it would help spread the diseases of WM even faster, but it seems that pleading with content providers to adopt QuickTime (or something else that is more cross-platform friendly) is just not working. I know, I've tried it already. They don't care, use VLC they say, or somesuch. If Apple are wise, they will recognise the reality of this and just add the format to QuickTime. Sure it's a backdown, but they must be getting used to the feeling by now.
Unfortunately it was the only way to play a lot of WMV files. VLC and MPlayer do not correctly play a lot of these files. I hope that I will be able to in the future. There are a lot of .wmv files floating around, and it would suck not being able to watch them on a Mac.
Cheers
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
First of all, I speak with experience, since I have 2 PCs in my office and 3 Macs and video work is part of my income.
Quicktime on the Mac is absolutely great mainly because it's so tightly integrated into the system and has sooo many years of development under its belt. The only drawback, is that if you want to save a video directly, go full screen, play back MPeg2s in it, or use it to export to other formats, you'll need to pay Apple $30 for the pro license. Earlier versins of QT did all of this for free. I own the pro license for both my Macs and PCs, so I'm not bothered by those deliberate shortcomings.
QT pro is quite uesfull for me on both platforms and for what it can do, at only $30, if you need these features, is a much better bargain than any other similar app I could find. Just to give you an example, there are some codecs that I still can not convert on my Mac, mainly the old Indeo formats. When it comes to my PC software, I'm cheap, so I didn't want to spend that much on an app that could convert these videos into a format I could edit, so I spent days looking for preferably a free convertor for Windows and checked out demos of apps that could do it for under $200. I finally found a convertor that actually worked, at just over double the price of QT Pro and its final result wasn't that great, with a noticable loss of quality from the original no matter how I tweaked its limited settings. I always export to a raw format if possible, so that I can keep any loss of quality to a minimum, since I'll be recompressing later on. Anyways, I ended up buying QT Pro, since it can export these f*ed up codecs and at only $30 it did exacatly what I needed it to do with the desired and predictable results. My only other option(s), would've been to spend $400 on Cleaner XL for the PC, or some other similar app. And from experience, PCs now days can be quite slow when compared to Macs for video work in general, mainly because of Windows, so the last thing I'd want to do is spend that much money on a comp that's much better suited for other tasks. (I'm probably going to tick of some ignorant Anonymous Coward with that comment.) I also own Cleaner 6 for the Mac, which is a complete POS!!! So I defintely didn't want to give Discreet at the time more money.
QT on the PC is good now days IMO, but just like iTunes it's a step down from its Mac counterpart. I personally haven't had any issues in the past couple of years, but I do recall when QT was complete crap on a PC and on older configurations and in some cases with newer comps, it still is.
Here's another case where QT Pro is actualy better than MP, at least version 10 and that's in Mpeg2 playback speed. This was the case last year, so if MS has released a fix, I haven't updated my PC in over 5 months. MP9 on the PC has never had an issue and it's what one of my clients used to view the mpeg2s I created for his company, before putting it on their propietory boxes for further testing. After the techs upgraded his system to WMP 10, I got a call asking why my latest video wasn't palying smoothly. Anyways, I hadn't changed my settings before compressing and had a set standard I had to encode each video to. I ended up bringing my Powerbook down, showed him it played fine, where as his 3.4 GHz was now chocking, and it wasn't until we finally tested it on another PC in his office that still was using WM9, that it was not longer my problem. To finish my ramblings, his company purchased QT Pro for his PC and sure enough it played just as smoothly as it had with WM9.
WMV on the Mac has never improved. It suffers from poor play back speed, where a VLC and MPlayer will hand the same WMVs perfectly. I own Flip4Mac, so that I can convert WMVs into friendly format for my video apps, but every other month or so, I'm running into new videos that it can't play. Then they update it, it works, then once again, I run into more WMVs that will not play on it.
IMO, WMV definitely sucks worse in this case, because even though QT is
"winnners" and "realmedia" are not words typically used in the same sentence.
Why can't we all just use MPEGS and AVIs, and forget about movs and wmvs. there's no point to proprietary video codecs when there are so many open alternatives that are free and oftentimes superior (MPEG4 H.264 comes to mind)
Come on, it's not like Linux where when you switch to it it's really hard for n00bs, they are just video files!
And of course on that note, VLC rocks.
First, I agree with all above who have extolled the utter worthlessness of WMP (on either platform). I use this as an exemplar of evil UI design. What maroon decided that dragging the time cursor should NOT update the image in real time, as it does in QT Player? Who decided that hiding the config menu in some elaborately hokey frame was good design? And on and on... Piece 'o crap. Glad to see the back of it (though I only briefly ever used in on Mac and usually deleted it soon after). Still have to live with it on Windoze unless M$ caves completely and lets Flip4Mac do a QT codec for Windoze also. Ha!
Anyway, I write to mention experiences with the 2 contenda's for outputting WMVs from Mac, which are PopWire Technology and Flip4Mac. I've used PopWire's $30 (only!) WMV9 Export Component for QuickTime (a plug-in to QT) for about a year with great satisfaction. As much as I hate to create WMV's for anyone, the job and benighted clients sometimes require them. I've found that WMV is the all around best format to give someone a movie to embed into Windoze PowerPoint presentations.
The PopWire QT plug-in means that any and all QT apps (Final Cut, QT Pro, etc.) can directly output WMV as an exported file. Very handy. And, so far, no complaints: the quality is excellent as is the speed of conversion. I've used some of the (many) built-in presets, and diddled up a few of my own. The options dialog even lets you insert copyright and title and author metadata. Highly recommended.
I discovered Flip4Mac about a month ago and dorked with the demos, then last week hit the Buy button for WMV Studio Pro. So far, I've had OK success. I first tried to export some pieces I had created with After Effects (Animation or in other cases 10-bit uncompressed BlackMagic codec), using the 2-pass VBR in WMV SP. Not good. Not good at all! Took a REALLY long time (dual 2Ghz G5) and looked absolutely awful. I was getting a little sweaty palmed about all those bucks I just fired off to these guys, plus the deadline looming...
So I tried again with a 1-pass CBR preset, and while it took what seemed like a much longer time than PopWire would have, it did give a comparably respectable result. So I need to do some more tests to find out what works and what doesn't given different input material.
I have had reasonable success viewing the odd WMV on the web using the Flip4Mac web QT plug-in that is installed as part of the free WMV Player (all this functionality is included in the higher end, pay-fer products like Studio Pro). However, I saw that someone else had trouble with the Comedy Channel movies. I did also: I don't care really, I was just looking for a sample WMV to try out the install of last night's 2.0.1 patch, but I don't have an answer for what CC does wrong that everyone else seems to do right. Maybe it is a streaming thing?
"Unfortunately it was the only way to play a lot of WMV files."
To verify what "a lot" means, it does not mean most. "Most" WMV files play just great in VLC, the vast majority in fact. The only ones that will not play are ones using WMV3. For those I use Windows Media Player for Mac. So, the only ones that will not play on the Mac are the WMV 10/DRM'd videos (as far as I can tell, and I use this stuff daily). Big freakin' deal. If MS wants to shoot themselves in the foot by not paying a dev a weeks pay to port it to Mac, then fine. This Mac user couldn't care less... It is strange, though, that they would literally cut 4.5-5% (and growing) of the market for what should take a week to port to the Intel Macs (at most). Seems more like a defensive move on MS's part... strange indeed.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Quicktime on the Mac is absolutely great mainly because it's so tightly integrated into the system and has sooo ma
.wmv file before trying to run it in WMP, it gives you some lame-ass excuse not to play.
Apple integration of qt into OS = good
MS integration of browser into OS = bad
Huh?
Mac users, don't shed a tear. WMP, IMO is bad for a number of reasons when you look at the competition. I gave WMP 10 an honest try on my work computer to keep a list of whatever MP3s I had on my system at the time. For some strange reason I get duplicates of the same song, in consecutive order. No way to easily clear that out either.
The GUI is a big mess in either version 9 or 10. They try to put too much on the screen at one time. Compare that to the nice and tiny Winamp.
I hate the seek-ahead/rewind. You don't see it in realtime like quicktime has.
In version 9 they introduced a slight delay of controls when you went to fullscreen mode. No longer is it instantaneous like it was in previous versions.
It's very wimpy when you try to play just-downloaded files, etc. If you as much as look as a
I change the privacy settings like the error message said to, so i can see album info for tracks, and it still won't do it.
There's a freakin update every weeek it seems for it, yet it doesn't get any better.
Screw it, I'll use ITunes for MP3 management and winamp for quick play(ie play an mp3 without messing with the library)
According to an MSN press release, the content will be delivered via Windows Media-based video player, and is scheduled to be launched Q1 2006.