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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.'"
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...
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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)
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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.
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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?
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.
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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
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?