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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.'"
I've had a mac for two years and I didn't know Windows Media Player for mac even existed!
G4 Hackintosh
The whole relationship between Apple and Microsoft has been weird to me. I figure its a symbiotic relationship like a dead tree with a fungus. Why Microsoft was supporting a competitor at all is up for discussion. Seeing as how WMP wasn't really a money maker in the first place, it makes sense that they drop development.
Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.
So now they're going to buy all windows users a free mac?
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.
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
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Lucky you! http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/play er/flip4mac.mspx. They've provided a way to keep watching.
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.
You will see microsoft pulling all support for Apple out in the near future
Apple fans have taken to the street to celebrate this development.
I never knew what the sound of hot coffee comming out of my nose and splattering all over my monitor and keyboard sounded like until I saw that quote.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
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!
This is actually a huge upgrade and great news for Mac users.
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.
MacOS pioneered a ubiquitous universal media layer with QT and making the MS codecs part of that is just plain shu-weet. Most real users aren't all that concerned about how pretty or not the default player is, the big concern is getting the material in and out of any/all applications.
Now everything, from Pages to Word to whatever, will be able to embed, play, link almost every format.
Yeah, almost. Nope, not talking Real (is anyone?), rather the latest codecs from MS. I'm told by my video geekin' buddies that Flip4Mac, nifty as it is, is last year's code and can't handle the latest 'n greatest WMP 10 codes from MS. Anyone know the truth on this, done any testing?
However, more importantly, in spite of MS's promise at MacWorld last week of another 5 years of Mac Office (all of which is good profit) word is the black spot is on Mac projects and folks are being reassigned, contractors not being extended, the MacBU folks off in Sili Valley are finding their req's from the Redmond mothership are taking longer and loonggeerrrr to fill.
If so then there really is a sea change and the gentleman's agreement between MS & Apple seems to be coming to an end. Sure MS is gonna keep the Office stuff, heck most of it started on the Mac, makes money, and is a check-off item on procurement sheets requiring cross-platform.
But media, where Apple has traditionally been strong, where the iPod reigns, where his Steveness rules both a computer company and a production studio, where cross-platform for everyone has always been the rule, may be where the real break starts to happen. Apple has always been lazy about QT under Windows (heck QT Player still doesn't make use of Overlay, making it often a pain to work with) is MS now returning the favor and poisoning their own well?
Will next year the response to "I can't get this to play on my Mac" be "Install Windows Vista on it"?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Windows Media Player has been really important for the Mac because there are a lot of media out there that are WMF only.
However, we can hope that this will accelerate the move to open formats.
VLC.
I love it to death. It does everything quicktime should do.
videolan.org
A blog about stuff.
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; }
"Decode" is the only thing anyone in their right mind should be doing with WMV.
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
I hope Office for Mac is continued for as long as possible. Why? For some people, who are lucky enough to be able to use Macs as "work computers", it is really the *only* reason we are able to do so. The need to have "really good and mostly seemless" compatability with Windows MS Office users is practically a requirement, and no, OpenOffice does NOT fit the bill. Some day I hope to have a job where I don't have to care about office suites at all (MS Office or OpenOffice), but those days are not hear yet.
Basically, the Mac provides something that Linux currently cannot provide. It is a platform that software vendors recognize enough to willingly support as an end-user platform. Also, in the laptop world, it has 100% compatability and support with *all* the hardware features of the laptops on which it runs.
Even if I did eventually switch to a PC laptop, and tried to run Linux on it, I'd pretty much have to pay for something like CrossOver Office just to be able to use the darn thing.
If only MS (and everyone else) would realize that MS Office is an even more difficult monopoly on the buisness world than Windows itself... If somehow pigs flew and MS decided to make MS Office for Linux, two things would happen: 1. We'd all flame it while praising OpenOffice. 2. Those of us trying to use Linux as a work desktop would actually try to buy it in droves.
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.
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?
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The only concession Apple really made for Microsoft was to bundle IE as the default browser on the Mac for 5 years. Later in the DOJ's anti-trust case, Apple's Avi Tevanian testified that Microsoft had tried to get Apple to step out of the QuickTime for Windows business and focus only on video editing and playback on the Macintosh. Apple refused. Google for "quicktime knife the baby" for details.
it looks like Jobs is getting his revenge.
I think the only revenge Jobs ever wanted was for being kicked out of his own company. Not so much revenge even, it's more like vindication. He came back and led Apple out of the woods and back to greatness. The Mac/PC holy war was a lot like the Apple II/Mac holy war. Jobs invented it to serve his own purposes. He had no real emotional investment in it himself. That was made quite clear through his actions 8 1/2 years ago. I continued to allow folks like John Dvorak over at PC mag to goad me for a while after, but when the press no longer tagged Apple with the beleaguered moniker, I got over the whole thing myself. A computer is a tool. I prefer a Mac, but I can see where Windows PCs and various *nixes fit into the equation.
Bill Gates really doesn't figure into the picture here. He's always wanted to be the 'rockstar' that Jobs is, but no matter how much money he's made, he's never achieved that in his own mind. Jobs isn't concerned with Gates or money. After $100,000,000 he had more money than he could ever spend... to paraphrase Jobs. Jobs wants Apple to succeed out of personal pride. Beginning January 1, 1998 APPL has been a stock market superstar. Nobody can touch that track record. Given that they are still at 3% marketshare in their core market, they really have nowhere to go but up. Intel based Macs may very well be what turns the tables on Dell/HP/Lenovo dominance. And it won't have a thing to do with getting revenge on Gates. The technology deal with Microsoft announced at this MacWorld probably has a lot to do with that. Jobs wants Gates to support Windows on Apple hardware. Not as a replacement for OS X, but as a compliment to it. That way he can stand in front of a crowd at the next Macworld and say, "It slices, it dices, it runs Windows and Mac!" Jobs' "revenge" has nothing to do with Gates and everything to do with Jobs being escorted away from Apple campus in 1985. It's personal.
But that's just MHO :-)