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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?
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.
There's another reason as well. If Microsoft's actions limit the number of people who can view the files, there will be more of a push by consumers to get web sites like CNN.com that use Windows Media exclusively to support more formats. I think that Microsoft's hope is that this will keep people from migrating away from Windows, but I think it will have the opposite effect.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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'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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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?
... and then they built the supercollider.
"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